(excerpts from Reuters, all emphasis added)

Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel outlined his television strategy on Friday, saying that the Internet company wants to commission original content without aping existing TV networks.

Speaking to a group of top British TV executives who were not sure whether to regard Yahoo as friend or foe, Semel urged them to index their dormant archives and add them to Yahoo's video search service.

"Video search is a way to monetise some of the stuff that's lounging around in warehouses and hasn't made a dime for years," he said at the Royal Television Society conference.

... Semel said that the company hopes to go further, and urged independent producers to think of Yahoo as an outlet for new programming.

"I don't think that Yahoo or any other Internet company should try to become a television network," Semel added. "We will be nowhere if we have to create our own content."

He warned TV executives that television would lose an increasingly large slice of the advertising pie in coming years due to fragmenting audiences and the prevalence of ad-skipping technologies -- especially since consumers were spending more and more time on their computers.