Watching the News on Yahoo!

Surfing for news is taking on a whole new meaning. Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) will start offering news feeds from Disney's (NYSE:DIS) ABC News and Time Warner's (NYSE:TWX) CNN as part of the features on its Yahoo! News site come September.

Video on the Web has been around for quite some time, but only very recently has it begun to get a higher profile, as the likelihood that Web surfers will actually want the content has increased.

After all, when it was first introduced, few people had the high-speed Internet capabilities, much less the beefed-up processing power in their computers, to enjoy video anywhere other than their televisions.

Now that high-speed Internet has dropped to prices more palatable to average Internet users and increased in availability around the country, there are far fewer major hurdles to video becoming a common element of the online experience.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) certainly gets it -- it added video search to its Internet capabilities, although it ran into some snags concerning copyright right away.

Given all these elements, there's no surprise here. Yahoo! already has audio and video clips available in its news areas, in addition to the other text-based content it offers to surfers.

The move of course brings up many of the ideas at work when one thinks about current trends in media. It's been well-known that the major news agencies, some of which have been long dominant because of the power of television, have felt a great deal of sting from the Internet. That's not just because so many people turn to the Internet for their news on demand.

There's also that little thing called "blogging" -- the phenomenon that has made your average Internet user either a creator of news and commentary or a consumer of a different point of view than the major news organizations might provide. Bloggers have long made a name for themselves by watching and sometimes trumping or criticizing the media, going beyond the more passive viewing past.

Meanwhile, what better way to do get some additional traction online than to be a feature on Yahoo!'s well-known and highly trafficked news area?

When you really look at the big picture, there's also the continued push of convergence -- and the idea that stagnating in tradition could be a huge mistake for media companies. Moves like this one hammer that point home.

Here's some more recent word on Yahoo!:

• Investors booed Yahoo!'s most recent quarter.
• Yahoo! plans to punch up email.
• Is Yahoo!'s search of subscription-only sites superfluous?

Time Warner is a Motley Fool Stock Advisor recommendation.

Alyce Lomax does not own shares of any of the companies mentioned.