Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz used her fourth quarter earnings call to say that her ‘”competition is television”.  She meant this on two levels – firstly Yahoo’s display advertising business competes with television for advertisers budgets and secondly Yahoo’s video products compete with television for audience – read more on GigaOM.

On the audience side they are having at least some success as well, with their primetime recap show Primetime in No Time achieving a high of 12 million daily streams in November, which was larger than the “24” season premiere on television.  Yahoo is looking for more content as well, having recently done a deal with IAC’s new programming venture, Electus and previously announcing they were looking to acquire video companies with audience, content and community.

So Yahoo is an internet portal redefining itself as a television company, at least in part.

This is perhaps unsurprising given that television companies around the world are re-inventing themselves as internet portals, at least in part.  The most prominent and successful examples are perhaps Hulu in the US and the BBC’s iPlayer here in the UK, but there are legions of others, including one from each of the other large TV channels here in the UK.

With internet enabled TVs finally starting to hit the market it won’t be long before the internet companies are competing head on with TV companies the world over to be the gateway to video content.  When that happens the TV advertising budgets will start to flow rapidly to the web unleashing a raft of adtech opportunities in delivery and management.