shouting loudly

Yahoo! Reneges on Candidate Video Mashups

Despite bold promises to the contrary, Yahoo! will not help users to remix video from the search portal’s upcoming presidential debate.

From April until last Friday, Yahoo! was billing its upcoming quasi-debate between Democratic presidential candidates as “the first-ever online-only presidential mashup.” As Wired explains, they were offering to upload the raw footage to Yahoo’s “own web-based video editing service Jumpcut” to enable easy cut-and-pasting.

Monday, however, the company officially changed its mind. Viewers can now expect video-on-demand, YouTube-style, broken up by topics.

The term “debate” is also something of a misnomer. The company has recruited PBS host Charlie Rose to conduct 15 minute interviews. The portal will post the footage at its video-sharing site, and users will be able to watch candidates’ answers or embed segments into blog posts.

Presumably, Yahoo! still plans to fulfill the promise of interviews with the Democratic presidential candidates.