As Discovery orbited the Earth early last month, millions of people visited Yahoo, which runs the most popular news site on the Internet, to see the nail-biting conclusion to the troubled shuttle mission.
Could NASA find a way to bring the astronauts home safely?
Despite the drama and the huge number of people flocking to the site, Lloyd Braun, the television impresario hired last year to oversee Yahoo’s media operation, was not satisfied. All Yahoo was offering its users, Braun fumed, was a white page filled with links to other sites on the Web.
He made his frustration clear to Scott Moore, who had defected from Microsoft to run Yahoo’s news operation. Within a few hours, Moore orchestrated a quick fix to make the shuttle page comply with Braun’s mantras: More Immersive, More Engaging, and most of all, more original programming.
Braun’s handiwork is just starting to be seen at Yahoo. And as he increasingly puts his stamp on the company, the rest of the media — both old and new — are watching carefully, if not nervously.
Offbeat Sensibility
There will be elaborate attention-grabbing events and video-heavy programs in nearly every category of content Yahoo offers, from sports to health. All this Hollywood frenzy raises a question: Is Terry Semel, Yahoo’s chief executive and the former co-head of Warner Brothers, trying to turn Yahoo into the interactive studio of future?
The short answer is yes, but Semel’s ambitions are far bigger and more complex than that. He wants Yahoo to be seen as akin to Warner’s parent, Time Warner, which mixes content from the likes of Warner’s studios and CNN, with distribution, like its cable systems. Yahoo is both of those and a lot of software, too.
Four Pillars
Semel describes a strategy built on four pillars:
First, of course, to fend off Google that 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 Braun oversees — made both by Yahoo and other traditional media providers.
Fourth and last is personalization technology, to help users sort through vast choices to find what interests them.
Already, video search engines, run by Yahoo and others, have indexed more than 1 million clips, and only now are the big media outlets like Viacom and Time Warner moving to put some of their quality video online.
Increasingly, 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.
Semel thinks that his approach of 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.
Madison Avenue’s rush to advertise online is feeding this activity, both the simple but highly targeted text ads that flash on Web searches and the Internet versions of television commercials.
Difficult Competition
Indeed, analyst predicts that Yahoo may face difficulty in competing with the integrated media companies like Time Warner.
Yahoo has no shortage of competitors. Google and Microsoft are aggregating video content of others, but not making their own. Big media companies are starting to package and produce online video programming, like new offerings from MTV, owned by Viacom, and ESPN, a unit of Disney.
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 last month, and it is developing offerings, including a reality show about the music business and an entertainment news show.
So Braun’s job is straightforward: invent a medium that unites the showmanship of television with the interactivity of the Internet. Find a way to combine the best of Hollywood’s talent with the voice of the masses. And do it all before the biggest media and technology companies get there first.
Throwing out ideas a mile a minute, he talked about ways to bring in more information about the personal lives and families of the astronauts so we are really connected to these people. And he looked for ways that Yahoo users could add their own views and other content to the package.
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.