Tom Huntington, a spokesperson for DivX has announced that
DivX, a growing video compression software company, has signed a two
year deal with Yahoo! that replaces a previous agreement that DixX had
with Google.
As the terms of the contract state, DivX software will now be
offered with a co-branded Yahoo Toolbar and a version of IE7
pre-configured with Yahoo tools. Yahoo!, in exchange, will now provide
links to DivX and its online video service, Stage6, within the
Yahoo toolbar.
Could Yahoo! possibly be a better partner for DivX than Google?
“We had worked with Google for two years and it was a good
relationship. The deal we had with Yahoo was the most attractive to us
at this time,” Huntington said.
Both Companies Will Benefit
No financial details of the deal have
been released, but both companies stand a chance of benefiting from
this deal, especially DivX, which is quickly becoming a popular
standard to encode videos in, whether viewing them on the web or
sharing across the web.
“Our partnership with DivX gives Yahoo! the
ability to
offer our services to its growing global community, providing them with
one-click access to the Yahoo! network.The partnership will also
enable Yahoo!’s users worldwide to discover and benefit from
the video
technologies that DivX has to offer,” said Vish Makhijani,
General
Manager and Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Search.
Previously, Google’s search tools were bundled with
DivX software,
but this seemed less like a partnership, as I cannot recall any
promotion of DivX by Google in exchange.
Then again, Google has already
established itself as the internet search leader, a spot which Yahoo!
has desperately been trying to recapture. Perhaps, this is their way of
directly stealing a piece Google’s pie, so to speak.
Further Integration To Follow?
Look for the new Yahoo partnered DivX tools to launch sometime
in November 2007.
DivX Stage6
is no YouTube,
but It looks like Yahoo! still has some tricks up their sleeve to win
some of the market back from Google. The only question is, is it too
late or do they still have time to make a difference? Could this mean
some integration between Yahoo!
Video and DivX Stage6?
Michael Garrett is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com
