Yesterday Yahoo! launched a video search service as a beta. It works like you’d expect: you can search for videos! The Yahoo! Search Blog has more of the background about this new service.
What’s more interesting to me is a new draft RSS spec called Media RSS:
“Media RSS” is a new RSS module that supplements the enclosure capabilties of RSS 2.0. RSS enclosures are already being used to syndicate audio files and images. Media RSS extends enclosures to handle other media types, such as short films or TV, as well as provide additional metadata with the media. Media RSS enables content publishers and bloggers to syndicate multimedia content such as TV and video clips, movies, images, and audio.
The module moves beyond RSS 2.0 support for enclosures, providing some additional attributes but making most of them optional. Also, you can have multiple media elements in a single posting. This has promise for solving some of the problems being found in delivering podcast content.
It also looks like Yahoo! has a deal to provide JibJab content as well. There’s a link up to Grumpy Santa on the video search start page. I loved the JibJab political animations for this year’s election, but this Santa video is pretty lame by comparison.