Yahoo Shutters Yahoo Screen

Yahoo has turned off Yahoo Screen for good.

Yahoo Screen has been around in one form or another for almost a decade, though through most of the earlier years Yahoo mostly dabbled in video. The company started getting more ambitious a few years back when it started creating short-form content. Then last year it secured rights to a new season of the show Community, and this year it bought exclusive national rights to an NFL game, which it streamed.

But none of it was very successful.

Yahoo has already shut down Yahoo Screen and is moving the content to its digital magazine sites, according to Variety, which broke the story.

Burning Love alone almost justified the existence of Yahoo Screen, but the inability to capitalize on that modest success underscores the difficulty of succeeding in a business that has no shortage of competition.

Other companies are demonstrating that it remains possible to succeed -- or at least persist -- as an alternative source of video, however, so shutting down Yahoo Screen represents an acknowledgement that Yahoo lacks some combination of the will, the resources and investor patience required to continue to pursue the opportunity.

If only Yahoo had negotiated for the rights to a better game than the Bills-Jaguars, things might have been different.

Nah.

— Brian Santo, Senior Editor, Components, T&M, Light Reading