Livetext lets users text each other while conducting a video call – with a catch: there’s no audio. “You can be on the street, on a train, and you can actually text with somebody and see that reaction to that experience”.
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“Every platform shift leads to new forms of communication, driven by our desire to connect and interact in richer ways”, said Yahoo senior vice president of video, design and emerging products said in the release.
The app will be available for free Thursday on phones running Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS operating systems in the US, Canada, UK, France and Germany, as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where it’s available now.
The app’s format might sound restricting, but Yahoo says Livetext will help people to communicate more freely.
Livetext displays text messages and emojis on the video screen like Twitter’s Periscope, doesn’t save or archive chats and media files like Snapchat, and organizes contact lists and friend requests like Snapchat too. Vetr upgraded shares of Yahoo! from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating and set a $40.43 price objective on the stock in a research note on Monday. B. Wall Street did not seem impressed by the messaging app announcement, as the company’s share value hovered around $37.80 as of 1 p.m. after the press event had ended.
The move comes with Yahoo aiming to refocus its business on mobile and video after losing leadership in Web search.
A new mobile messaging app is a significant, forward-looking move by Yahoo because “consumers spend more time in these apps than few other places outside of social media”, says Julie Ask, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.
“We wanted to make sure there is no inhibition of answering or connecting”, he said. But instead of using audio, the app has a text feature that appears on top of the live video.
Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, July 21st. The company’s revenue for the quarter was up.3% on a year-over-year basis. We think you’re really going to love it.
This story was first published on CNN.com, “Yahoo launches a monster of a messaging app”.
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