Yahoo announced they would be handling the webcast of the Discovery’s return to space. Yahoo has been granted live, 24-7 access to the 12-day mission including take off, space walks and landing.
The agreement is significant because NASA doesn’t do this very often. This marks one of their first online collaborations and it will be available both from NASA’s website and Yahoo.
Yahoo will runs ads for this offering throughout the Yahoo network of services promoting this event including their front page feature and their Yahoo News feature. This is a big deal for Yahoo because this allows them the ability to separate themselves from their SEO competitors further.
Yahoo has added another direction to their SEO that others like MSN and Google have yet to add. One would think MSN might be the leader on this with its obvious tie to MSNBC but that wouldn’t seem to be the case. Yahoo scored big on this one and even if they don’t make a lot of money on it, this will still be another notch to put in their belt.
Yahoo has been adding these types of features lately and has been working on building relationships in Hollywood. That culminated when Showtime ran the first episode of their Kirstie Alley series “Fat Actress”. This was another big coup for Yahoo is they look to expand their services.
Yahoo has always gone for the personal touch side of the SEO business. Google gets much of the headlines right now on the SEO front because they’ll search just about anywhere except under your bed. Yahoo has about the same search capacity with their search engine but they’ve got a much more personal feel to their products. Much of it can be customized much more than is currently possible with Google, MSN and others.
Yahoo will be running the NASA webcast through a Windows Media stream accessible at Yahoo’s site as well as NASA’s home page. I’d recommend checking out NASA’s Return to Flight feature with Scott Bakula. It’s a good lead in.
Coverage will begin tomorrow, as the STS 114 Space Shuttle Discovery is slated lift off tomorrow at 3:51 p.m. EDT. Right now, the shuttle is slated to fly although there is some worry at this point that thunderstorms might force a delay. They were predicting a 30% chance of the storm.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
