Yahoo! Rolls Out New Webcasting Effort

Yahoo! (YHOO) took another small step Monday on its line-blurring quest to become a television/radio/entertainment powerhouse.

Timed with the opening of the broadcasting industry's biggest national convention, Yahoo! unveiled a new version of its online Webcasting property -- one that amasses and spotlights all the audio and video broadcasts previously scattered throughout different areas of Yahoo!.

Along with recent announcements of a major online music pact and the appointment of Hollywood executive Terry Semel as chairman and CEO, the announcement illustrates how Yahoo! is slowly attempting to transform itself from a text-heavy, utilitarian Web site into -- partly, at least -- an online entertainment center.

"I would say we are a broadcaster," says David Mandelbrot, general manager of Yahoo! Entertainment. "We are an online broadcaster."

Nowadays, all the music, movies and TV programming on Yahoo! is available for free, though Mandelbrot says the company is developing the idea of online broeadcasting subscriptions.

Yahoo! fell $1.89, or 9%, Monday to close at $17.96.

Starting Monday, visitors to Yahoo! Broadcast's home page at broadcast.yahoo.com are linked not just to a menu of programming, but also to Yahoo!'s version of an interactive television set -- a tripartite window comprising a video screen, a second panel including text, links and other material relevant to the audio or moving-image broadcast, and a set of links to other Yahoo! programming.

In addition, the site serves as a centralized repository of audio and video broadcasts streamed on different areas of Yahoo!, says Mandelbrot, such as the company's FinanceVision financial news show, old TV shows and cartoons, news from ABCNews.com and live Webcasts of conventional television and radio stations.

"It's very hard to draw the line between entertainment and utility," Mandelbrot says. "Our big goal here is to make Yahoo! -- our entertainment offerings -- a place where people can come to be entertained."

Jupiter Media Metrix analyst Dannielle Romano says it's unclear whether Yahoo! will be able to build a good business out of streaming media ads -- commercials built into the audio and video feeds that Yahoo! transmits. "Streaming ads are an expensive business," she says. "It's a rather tricky proposition."

But Romano says she's excited by the opportunities that Yahoo! has to make money from selling broad yet searchable audio/video archives, along the lines of CNN's plans, announced Monday, to convert its videotape archives into a digitized, searchable database. "We're convinced at Jupiter that that's something that can really work," Romano says.

Yahoo! says more than a third of its 192 million registered users reach the site through a high-speed connection that makes it easy to stream audio or video to individuals' computers.

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