Written By Reprise Media | June 19, 2006 | Share This |

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According to Red Herring, Yahoo! will come out with an upload service at the end of June that will allow camera phone-wielding “citizen-journalists” to supply video footage of momentous events directly to Yahoo! News - eventually, they won’t even need a PC (via Search Engine Journal). Officially, Yahoo! is mum, but according to one source (quoted anonymously), terrorist attacks jump started the idea:

“It was the aftermath of the London bombings that woke up Yahoo and the rest of the media…They started thinking of the amazing resource that is the army of people walking around with still picture and video cameras in their cell phones.”

Amateur footage was also instrumental in conveying the horror of the 2004 tsunami. While news like that isn’t likely to happen very often, camera-worthy events of lesser magnitude are a far more frequent occurrence. Here’s another snip from he-or-she-who-cannot-be-named:

“…News of local and regional importance happens all the time…A small plane crashes near a beach. By the time the news reporters get there, the plane is under 50 feet of water and the pilot swam safely ashore…Chances are very good that someone on that beach has a video camera and recorded that event as it happened.”

Even with a mechanism like Yahoo!’s proposed service in place, logistical challenges would remain. A phone camera-person on the scene to grab footage of breaking news still may not have brought along their walking WiFi access point and laptop to upload the goods. Yahoo!’s reportedly tackling that problem using MMS, a “messaging protocol developed primarily for industrial applications.” Dialing a 5-digit “short code,” users could upload video to Yahoo! news just by pressing the ’send’ button. The expensive technology will probably not be available when the Yahoo! News upload service first comes on line, but the prospect of its future inclusion should be tantalizing for armchair scoops everywhere.

Topics: Yahoo! |