I was watching Bwanna of Ustream fame talking about Microsoft/Ustream merger or rather the rumour of MS buying Ustream out, the main reason MS would do this is to get there Silverlight out there in the wild. He made mention that Yahoo were also going to do there own streaming service and with all the problems that Ustream are having of late, I thought I would give this a try.

http://live.yahoo.com/

If you already have a Yahoo account (most have) then you can sign right in and start broadcasting. The best way to look at this Yahoo Live thing is almost a direct look-a-like of StickAm. There is a main Video window with 4 Small Boxes on the bottom, these allow people to be added in a sort of multi user video chat if you like. People can seem to add themselves to this box without any sort of control. As for the Chat part – this allows Kick + Ban but no way to assign OP permissions for example to other people in the room. I would say this is not an attempt at a system similar to UStream which is geared for one person streaming while many join and chat.

My Only point I would add is that instead of putting all your eggs into one basket, you could in fact use any of the various Streaming Services out there, remove the chat feature and you can have your chat on any IRC Server you wanted along with a JavaScript IRC CHat client for the web visitors to your page and links on the streaming sites as to how to obtain the chat page.