Alternatives to Yahoo Live ?

December 1, 2008 6:16 PM

Yahoo Live (online service for group webcam/chat) is closing its doors. Anyone recommend a service with similar features?

I've played around with it a couple times back when it was "beta".. but a couple days ago it finally clicked and I realized what a slick interface it is. Sadly, Yahoo Live is apparently closing its doors on December 3rd.

Does anyone know of a similar service that has options like: Group webcam sharing, group chat. Bonus if it includes streaming audio and filesharing. Yeah - probably a lot to ask for.

posted by jmnugent to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Crap that's terrible news, Y live was great.

I'm sure people will mention justin.tv, which in my experience is just awful- constantly goes offline for no reason, and when it is working, huge lag times of up to 10 seconds.

There's another that's even worse- their web interface was so bad that buttons and stuff were positioned on top of each other, to the point of making the page unreadable. On Windows. In Firefox. I forget the name, but it's very famous considering the hideous interface.
posted by drjimmy11 at 8:40 PM on December 1, 2008

Previously
posted by misterbrandt at 9:13 PM on December 1, 2008

Does Skype share multiple webcams? It certainly does the group chat and filesharing well, and person to person webcams work great.
posted by Mil at 3:40 AM on December 2, 2008

Whenever I've used skype for a multi-party phone call, the program automatically shuts off the webcams once a third person joins. Last time I tried, though, was a year ago. There may also be an extra service (for pay) that allows more than webcams for a more-than-2-person call.
posted by msbrauer at 5:34 AM on December 2, 2008