Yahoo last night quietly kicked off a new competitor to YouTube which lets anyone “create their own live video experience.” It is called Y! Live and you can access it for free.

Y! Live is targeted towards people who want to do live video broadcasting. Through it Yahoo sees people, for example, broadcasting live musical performances and interacting with fans with video and chat. The broadcast can be embedded, so viewers don’t have to go to the Y! Live site to view it.

The Y! Live development team has made the API and embeddable components available to anyone to access so customization can occur. Yahoo warns though Y! Live is “an experimental release” so you can expect plenty of bumps along the way. This was apparently evident within a few hours of the site going live, with reported traffic surges causing outages.

Y! Live [via News.com]