It’s Not TV, It’s Yahoo – New York Times

There will be elaborate attention-grabbing events and video-heavy programs in nearly every category of content Yahoo offers, from sports to health. The first is called “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone,” an audio-video-photo-blog-chat room, run by Mr. Sites, an experienced foreign correspondent, who plans to visit multiple war zones over the next year.

All this Hollywood frenzy still skirts a question: Is Terry S. Semel, Yahoo’s chief executive and the former co-head of Warner Brothers, trying to turn Yahoo into the interactive studio of the future?

The short answer is yes, but Mr. Semel’s ambitions are far bigger and more complex than that. He wants Yahoo to be seen as more akin to Warner’s parent, Time Warner, which mixes content like Warner and CNN with distribution, like its cable systems. Yahoo is both of those and a lot of software, too.

Mr. Semel describes a strategy built on four pillars: First, is search, of course, to fend off Google, which has become the fastest-growing Internet company. Next comes community, as he calls the vast growth of content contributed by everyday users and semiprofessionals like bloggers. Third, is the professionally created content that Mr. Braun oversees, made both by Yahoo and other traditional media providers. And last, is personalization technology to help users sort through vast choices to find what interests them.

Madison Avenue’s rush online is feeding this activity, both the simple but highly specific-target text ads that flash on Web searches and the Internet versions of TV commercials.

Increasingly, Mr. Semel and others are finding that the long-promised convergence of television and computers is happening not by way of elaborate systems created by cable companies, but from the bottom up as video clips on the Internet become easier to use and more interesting. Already, video search engines, run by Yahoo and others, have indexed more than one million clips, and only now are the big media outlets like Viacom and Time Warner moving to put some of their quality video online.

“The basis for content on the Internet is now shifting from text to video,” said Michael J. Wolf, a partner at McKinsey & Company. “This allows advertisers to take advantage of the kind of branding advertising they are used to on television.”

Mr. Semel thinks that his approach combining content and technology could well make Yahoo the place people go first when they decide what to watch, as well as where to surf.

“You are not going to have 1,000 channels, you will have an unlimited number of channels,” Mr. Semel said. “So you aren’t going to use a clicker to change channels.”
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Time Warner’s AOL unit is Yahoo’s most direct and ambitious competitor in video programming. AOL attracted a lot of attention with its interactive presentation of the Live8 concerts, and it is developing offerings, including a reality show about the music business and an entertainment news show. Indeed, Mr. Wolf predicts that Yahoo may face difficulty in competing with the integrated media companies, like Time Warner. “The television programmers now have the upper hand because they have a great deal of content they can use for a variety of purposes and promote it on their existing programs.”
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For this year, a handful of programs will emerge, in addition to the Kevin Sites site. Mr. Braun’s group has introduced “Blog for Hope,” a series of celebrity blogs about coping with cancer.

And later this year it will introduce an adventure travel program with Richard Bangs, a self-styled trip leader, who had worked for Mr. Moore at MSN.

“I come from a medium which allows you to represent a pretty static linear picture,” Mr. Braun said. “It’s very passive.” At Yahoo, he does not plan any half-hour or hourlong programs, but shorter segments that users can assemble into longer experiences of their own choosing.

The Internet reflects what Mr. Braun calls “the A.D.D. generation,” where people watch TV, read something online, chat on a cellphone and send instant messages – all at the same time. He talks of short, frequent video segments, surrounded by other information that users can interact with in their own way and contribute to as well.

One of Yahoo’s secret weapons, Mr. Braun says, is that it can personalize information for the interests of each user, such as its My Yahoo page and the song recommendations provided to users of its music service. Mr. Braun is weaving this technology into a video player Yahoo will introduce near the end of the year.

“It will almost be like a television set,” Mr. Braun said, except as people watch one program, on the center of the player, other areas will offer additional programming choices, based on their past viewing habits. It will let them use Yahoo’s video search to find programs from amateur videographers and video bloggers. And it will, of course, promote the glitzy shows Mr. Braun is creating.

“People want the freedom to do exactly what they want to do,” he said. “But they also like to be programmed to and reminded of the different things that exist. Yahoo is in a position to do both of those.”