Yahoo released an experimental live video product today in the vein of Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Operator11, blogTV and many others. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Yahoo Live (which was first reported by Valleywag).

“How is Y! Live different from other online video sites? That’s simple: it’s live,” says the announcement post on the Yahoo Next blog. That might have been a viable statement a year ago, but at this point it’s just not true. The site has had a hard first day, going down when we and others tried to visit it.

Despite that, the power of a Yahoo soft-launch seems to be pretty strong, with 2,609 concurrent viewers last time I checked, more than any other live video aggregator I went to in the course of writing this article tonight. That is, if Yahoo’s visitor counter is working correctly under the load.

P.S. A simple way to my heart, live video sites? Be the first one I’ve seen that doesn’t auto-play video, with sound, whenever I load the page.