Yahoo Goes Mobile, Google Goes to Video at CES

(Direct Newsline)— two biggest search powers are setting their sights beyond either search or the browser and aiming to become more integral to entertainment on the Web, judging by the announcements their CEOs made at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.

Yahoo! and Google both debuted services that will let users interact in new ways with movies and video over the Internet. And while only Yahoo’s offering will open up new territory for ads in the short term, both may eventually result in new opportunities for marketers to get in front of users.

Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel used his CES keynote speech on Friday to unveil Yahoo Go, a portfolio of new services that will let users access their Yahoo! content— photos, calendar, e-mail, instant messages and address books— a number of devices connected to the Internet, including mobile phones and TVs connected to a personal computer. The new services, Yahoo Go Mobile, Yahoo Go TV and Yahoo Go Desktop, have interfaces specifically designed to suit users’ devices and will automatically be able to detect what kind of device they’re being accessed over.

Yahoo! Go Mobile will offer communications and media applications from Yahoo! and will solve common problems such as losing contact phone numbers along with a lost phone. With Yahoo Go Mobile, those contact numbers can be stored on the Web and accessed via another phone. Users will also be able to upload photos from their camera phones directly to a Yahoo Photos Web page. Yahoo! has deals in place with Nokia and Motorola to build phones that incorporate Yahoo Go Mobile, and Cingular Wireless will also deliver the services on mobile devices it offers to users.

With Yahoo! Go TV, slated to be generally available in April, users with computer-connected television sets can perform local and video searches over their TVs after downloading a small application to their PCs. They will also be able to view personal photos, access images from Yahoo! photos and store or find friends’ shared photos in Flickr, search for movie times at local theaters or watch movie trailers, and access other personalized content from their My Yahoo! service. Yahoo! Go TV will reported be free, but will carry some advertising.

Yahoo! Go Desktop will offer computer users a suite of small applications— as “widgets”—that can perform useful tasks without opening the browser, including checking for Wi-Fi networks and providing one-click access to Web search or Flickr photos. Later this year, the company will launch services to let mobile users program TiVo video recorders via their mobile phones.

“We think the Internet is not a Web page or desktop, [but] an infrastructure and delivery vehicle for communication, experiences, entertainment and any kind of data you use on the Internet,” Semel told the audience of electronics vendors. “The next generation is about ease of use and open platforms that connect the Internet to any device that you all will be manufacturing.”

The closing keynote by Google CEO Larry page came after a flurry of rumors about a low-cost “Google Cube” computer that would run on something other than a Microsoft operating system. The rumors led attendees to begin lining up for Page’s speech an hour in advance, but they did not prove true. Rather than announcing a device, Page debuted the Google Video Store, an iTunes-like Internet service on which Google will sell video content downloads.

Some of the content of the Google Video Store will be commercially produced; for example, Google has deals with CBS to offer episodes of CSI and Survivor 24 hours after they air for $1.99 each, and to sell day-old games from the National Basketball Association for $3.95. But the service will also offer user-created content and will be able to charge fees as low as 5 cents a download.

A proprietary copy-protection system will let content providers determine how many times a video can be viewed and whether it can be transferred to other devices, such as a TV, video iPod or Sony PSP console. Google will also let content suppliers offer their video products on other Web sites.

Press reports said that while Google has no current plans to include advertising in its video service, the company was in discussion with content owners about possibly inserting ads later after the launch, which has no specified date.

Google also unveiled its own video player for the computer— backhanded slap at Microsoft, whose Windows Media Player the company could have licensed. User can download the player as part of the Google pack, a collection of diverse software applications for accessing the Internet. Other applications include a Mozilla Firefox browser, Google Desktop, Google Toolbar, Google Earth and photo storage application Picasa.

As of Saturday, bloggers were reporting that the Google Video Player, initially included in the Google Pack download, had been removed.