PC World Business

Yahoo Thursday introduced video Web sites in France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

The sites are similar to the one that launched in the U.K. in early October and to Yahoo Video, which launched in the U.S. in June.

The sites are designed to allow users to search videos from around the Web and also let anyone to upload videos for sharing. The new sites in Europe mostly feature videos in local languages.

Users can search for videos that may be hosted on other sites as well as those from Yahoo's database of hundreds of millions of music, news, sports, movie and TV videos.

The videos carry tags with different categories to help users find the types of videos they may want to see and users can subscribe to specific video channels.

In addition, Web site owners can share videos from the site by embedding Yahoo's video player with the video of their choice into their Web site.

Some of the localized sites will compete with other established video-sharing Web sites. In Germany, for example, myvideo.de is already a popular video sharing site. Google, which recently announced plans to buy the dominant video-sharing Web site, YouTube, also has Google Video sites in seven European countries.