Can Yahoo Screen become a serious YouTube competitor?

YouTube is not the only online platform on which Internet users can upload, share and watch videos but it is without doubt the most popular one.

While that is the case, there is a growing number of users and content producers who dislike YouTube or some of its features but stick with it because of a lack of alternatives.

Dailymotion and Vimeo, two other video services, never managed to grow substantially to get close to YouTube's level of traffic.

Things may change in 2015 however as several companies are preparing to improve their video offerings.

Facebook for one acquired QuickFire Networks recently and its video bandwidth optimization technology. The company delivered more than 1 billion video views per day in the second half of 2014 according to a Wired report and expects that figure to rise even further.

While that is the case, videos uploaded to Facebook are often limited to a certain group of users only. Plus, there is no Facebook Videos portal available that works similar to YouTube or other video services.

Yahoo on the other hand has big plans for its Yahoo! Screen video service. The service, started in 2006, is one of the many company products that most Internet users have probably never heard of.

Yahoo started to get serious about promoting the video service back in mid-2014 when it announced that it would offer free live concerts on the site for a year featuring acts such as Kiss, Justin Timberlake or Usher.

But that is just part of the company's strategy. Last month, it finalized the acquisition of Brightroll, a video advertising platform for $640 million US Dollars.

Yahoo has also been in talks with high-profile networks and video creators on YouTube to get them to switch to the company's own video service. Incentives that it offers include better ad-rates and extensive marketing on the company's own network including the Yahoo homepage.

Unlike YouTube, Yahoo! Screen is limiting video uploads to its service meaning that only select content producers can upload videos to the service while the majority of users can't.

While concentration on high quality content may make sense for Yahoo, it is also a limiting factor as it prevents the majority of YouTube video uploaders from moving to the platform if they wanted to.

With that said, Yahoo may change that in the future. Since video advertising is growing on Tumblr, Yahoo could consider opening its platform on Tumblr first so that videos from the company's own service are published on the site and not embedded from third-party video sites.

Yahoo! Screen will certainly grow in 2015 because of Yahoo's efforts to bring networks and publishers to the platform but it seems unlikely that it will come close to YouTube traffic levels in 2015.

Now You: Do you think that we will see the rise of a YouTube competitor in 2015?