Microsoft, which tried unsuccessfully to acquire Yahoo in 2008, is thinking about making another run at the company. This time, though, a merger of the two companies could impact the entertainment landscape.

To be clear: There's no offer at this point and there's apparently a lot of internal debate about whether to make one at Microsoft headquarters these days. And, technically, Yahoo hasn't announced it's for sale – though it has been talking quietly with potential bidders.

Reuters, which initially reported Microsoft's renewed interest in Yahoo!, notes other bidders for the company include Providence Equity Partners, Hellman & Friedman and Silver Lake Partners, as well as Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Russian technology investment firm DST Global.

Were Microsoft and Yahoo to come together, though, things are notably different than they were three years ago. Yahoo has invested heavily in original content in that time. Just this week, in fact, the company unveiled plans for eight new Web-based shows targeted at women. That will bring the count up to 26.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has been focusing on distributing content, especially through its Xbox 360 console. (Earlier today, the company announced its lineup of 40 programming partners to stream live TV and VOD programs through the system.)

Yahoo's original content might help the Xbox broaden its appeal to women and give it a leg up in original content for the Xbox, an area Sony has been exploring on the PlayStation 3 with reality fare such as The Tester.

The 2010 Consumer Electronics Show has lost one of its high-profile keynote speakers.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has bowed out, citing a “scheduling conflict,” according to Karen Chupka, senior vice president of conferences and events for the Consumer Electronics Association.

She declined to offer further details.

The loss of Bartz is a noteworthy one. Yahoo skipped last year’s CES keynote circuit and onlookers were hoping Bartz would this year shed light on the company’s plans for its media properties, which are seeing their funding increase as Yahoo shuts down other divisions. The company also has some interesting projects underway that related to Internet-enabled TVs.

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs will seemingly take Bartz’s place in the keynote lineup. The CEA added him yesterday at a press conference in New York.

Other keynote speakers at this year’s show include Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the CEA’s Gary Shapiro, Ford CEO Alan Mulally, Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasuvo and Hisense Chairman Zhou Houjioan.

Over the years Yahoo has invested a lot in making its music section work. First it bought Launch in 2001 for $12 million and turned that into its radio player. Then in 2004 it bought MusicMatch for $160 million with hopes of turning its software into the world's default music player. And it invested untold millions in an abandoned attempt to sell music downloads and subscriptions to compete with iTunes, Rhapsody, and the rest of the crowded market.

As evidenced in my recent interview with North America audience senior VP Jeff Dossett, Yahoo has accepted that none of those efforts bore much fruit and is taking a partnership approach to its music site -- let others supply the content and provide a great format to present it.

That will be on full display tomorrow when Yahoo Music launches artist pages. According to numerous reports, if you click on "Beyonce" or "Taylor Swift," you won't see a page full of Yahoo content. Instead, there will be modules with content from Rhapsody, Last.FM, iTunes, Amazon, Pandora, and more, making it easy for users to get download links, concert information, news, song streaming, and more. Yahoo doesn't have to do anything but make it look pretty.

Like most media companies, Yahoo has to pick the areas where it's going to invest in original content and where it's going to use the power of the Web, especially the ability to embed other folks' content, to simply be a hub. Yahoo artist pages will apparently be a prime example of how the latter will work.

(Yahoo is apparently in the midst of making the shift, since if you click on any artist's name on the site right now, you get a "Bad Request" notice.")

[Artist pages screenshot from CNET News]

There's no shortage of content for young men on the Internet. The hottest audience for media companies now is Moms.

Case in point: Disney yesterday acquired Kaboose, a relatively small collection of Websites aimed at parents that deal with baby, child and family issues, for $18.4 million. For a huge media conglomerate, that's a tiny purchase and a sign that it wants to grab sites like Kaboose's Babyzone.com,  AmazingMoms.com, and FunSchool.com early on, before they become, say, Club Penguin expensive.

In its press release announcing the deal, Disney wasn't at all shy about its intentions:

But Disney isn't the only company thinking this way. In a recent interview on this blog, Yahoo's exec VP of U.S. Audience Jeff Dossett (the guy in charge of original content) said that "Chief Household Officers," his company's term for professional moms, is a top demographic priority. "It's an audience that's of very high interest to advertisers because they spend a lot of time online, they're very influential in a very high percentage of household purchases, and they're actually not well served online today," he explained.

Looks like it won't be underserved for long, however. The race for Moms, it seems, is on.

In the final part of our five part interview with Jeff Dossett, Yahoo's senior VP of audience and head of the Santa Monica office, we talk about the biggest picture issues: The meaning of the Yahoo brand, the relevance of a portal with a home page, and whether digitally savvy audiences are still interested in what his company has to offer.

For more on Dossett, read the introduction to part one of our interview. Read part two here, part three here, and part four here.

Ben Fritz: Going forward, when you think about “What is Yahoo?” and/or “What is Yahoo content?” do you see the old portal model where people come to a homepage and you can shoot them all around as something that's becoming less and less important? The “I am a Yahoo user, I go to Yahoo.com, I go to Yahoo Mail, I go to Yahoo News,” versus “I come into it a million different ways?”

Jeff Dossett: Great question. I think the front page will continue for many years to be an essential experience for Yahoo users. It's where we get to reflect our understanding of a broad set of content and information and service needs and try to curate that experience. Try to find the best: try to make it easier for people to find the information and services and experiences that matter most to them.

I do think the front page or the homepage experience will evolve. I think it will evolve in two key ways. One is, I think that we'll improve our ability to present a more relevant front page experience as an essential starting point to Yahoo users. We'll be able to reflect what we know about you and your interests and your experience on the network, and tune the content experience to your particular needs. That's one thing. Sort of, again, the audience-segment-centric position to deliver the best, most relevant content experience to each and every user.

The other is that Yahoo has clearly, strongly embraced the power of openness. We want to make it easier for consumers to make sense of the Internet, for them, in a way that's relevant to them, and to the extent that there are information sources or services that are important to users that exist outside of the Yahoo network, we'd like to make it easier for them to bring them into the experience, as we've had traditionally in experiences like My Yahoo.

So I think you'll see the front page as a starting point evolve to be more personally relevant and more customizable, including the inclusion of experiences that are currently thought of as outside the Yahoo experience.

We have begun to communicate a little bit more broadly about our plans for the evolution of the Yahoo homepage. “More open, more social, and more relevant” are our three key themes, and I think it's an essential part, because with all of the world's information available online, the burden on a consumer to find and discover the information and services important to them, that complexity is actually increasing right now, and Yahoo has traditionally helped people discover and interact with the content and services that are most important to them. I think that will continue to be one of the key elements of differentiation and the value that we bring to online consumers, so we'll definitely do that.

At the same time, there are many different entry points into the network. There are some people who are news junkies, they just love the news, and that's really the right and most appropriate starting point for them, and we'll want to serve them as well. OMG for others. We think holistic, and we're not dependent on the front page, but we recognize the value it plays in helping simplify the complexity of the richness of the Internet.

BF: And that idea of Yahoo as an editor in a sense, as opposed to, for people who are very tech-savvy, the idea of “I get my RSS feeds, and I have everything, and nobody tells me what I want?” It sounds like you're saying there's still a lot of value, at least for some audiences, in that Yahoo's going to tell you “Here's ten things that you should see,” or otherwise present the user with information that they might not have asked for.

In part four of our five part interview, Yahoo's audience group senior VP Jeff Dossett, who runs the Santa Monica office, talks about whether having an L.A. office still makes sense, his view on infusing social media into the portal experience, and how Yahoo can compete against Google in search.

For more on Dossett, read the introduction to part one of our interview. Reads part two here and part three here.

Ben Fritz: You mentioned the value of being here in Santa Monica. Obviously this office was started when the Media Group was a more separate entity and was being headed by someone who came from the more traditional media business trying to do something more Hollywood in terms of programming.

Now, you're heading the audience group that includes the stuff in Santa Monica, and includes some stuff up in Sunnyvale – Is there still much value in being in Santa Monica? If this were all to move to Sunnyvale right now, would it make a big difference?

Jeff Dossett: I think there's tremendous value being here in Santa Monica. First of all, as I mentioned earlier, this is an incredible market of creativity and innovation in and around consumer content and media experiences. From a partnering perspective, from a talent pool to attract to Yahoo, to our ability to interface and interact face to face, day in and day out, with movie studies for premieres or showings, or even just developing relationships with the key, influential leaders in the media and entertainment business. You asked right at the beginning about the things that sort of attracted me to Yahoo; being in this environment, in this office, close to this industry is a strong attractor.

I do think that if you step back and look at all user behavior online, and you think from a multi-decade perspective – try to think out five, ten, twenty years – one of the most significant trends will be the willingness of users to consume more entertainment in total online, and certainly more content which is traditionally best created in this community and this marketplace. I think there's a great collaboration to be had as that user behavior changes over time.

BF: Who do you see your competitors as, now? We talked about the media companies, but you're a portal, and there's a traditional portal experience in which MSN and AOL are obviously still there competing, and have their own problems, but do you see your competition more broadly than Yahoo's competition may have been three years ago? Whether it's social media, whether it's the old media companies we talked about a little bit before, whether it's online service companies, who do you think about your main competitors as being?

In part three of our five part interview with Jeff Dossett, Yahoo's senior VP of audience who heads up the Santa Monica office, he talks about Yahoo's unique, research- and advertiser-driven approach to developing original video programming, as well as whether big media companies are partners or competitors (or both).

For more on Dossett, read the introduction to part one of our interview. Read part two here.

Ben Fritz: What about your approach to original video programming? It seems like with your new celebrity mom show, I'm forgetting the name –

Jeff Dossett: “Spotlight to Nightlight.” I love it.

BF: It seems like there was the old approach, the one I think Yahoo was taking, was the TV approach, which is “Come in and pitch me twenty shows, make three of them and see which one hits.” Seeing how you developed “Spotlight,” it seems like the content sort of came last. First “What's the audience,” and then you had an advertiser, and then you designed the content around that rather than listening to pitches. Is that right, is that your general approach nowadays?

JD: I think that's accurate. I think that we take a much more audiences-insights-centric approach to determining where can we add value, where can we serve an unfilled or unmet audience need uniquely well, and so we start with the vast amount of data that we have within our interactions with online users, and from industry research, and we keep peeling away layers of the onion to find something that's uniquely actionable – that nugget of audience insight that we can focus our innovation in and around, and when you do that you create blockbuster hits. They break through all the clutter online, and they propel Yahoo to number one.

OMG was a great example of that, as an overall experience. “Primetime in No Time,” for that particular segment. “Tech Ticker” in the business and financial news segment. It resonates so well with the audience: “Help make sense of what's happening in the marketplace today.” We need to have all the articles from the authoritative business content providers, but now we make it more human, we make it more understandable, we make it more relevant to our audience. The engagement level with “Tech Ticker” has been extraordinary. And as a result of that, we've made it easier for people to consume the content in a manner in which they want, and subsequently they interact more deeply with the rest of content on Yahoo Finance.

There are so many examples: “Good Morning Yahoo,” for news. “The Sports Minute,” for sports. These all come from audience insights first, and then, working with advertisers who also are trying to connect with this audience, we collaborate and then identify unique, compelling, innovate experience for users, and we build that and deliver that, and each time we do that we create a hit.

It's focused, targeted original programming. We're not confused about which business we're in, or what type of company we are. The vast majority of content that exists on the Yahoo network is licensed or acquired from other people who are experts in that area, but we can absolutely add value, and original programming is a great tool, or tactic that we use. It really adds the Yahoo tone, personality and essence to the experience that might otherwise be somewhat commodotized or equivalent across the market.

BF: Along those lines of content, I'd like to get your perspective on how you see Yahoo partnering or competing with traditional media companies, networks, etc. One great example might be something like Hulu. I think when it started, we all thought, “Oh, Yahoo and the other big websites are going to be the place people find this content,” and it seems like Hulu.com has become a much bigger competitor than maybe a lot of people thought, as opposed to the syndication model. Do you still see them as really valuable partners and advertisers, or do you also see them as competitors you're going up against in some categories?

In part two of our five part interview with Yahoo audience group senior VP Jeff Dossett, whose responsibilities include the Santa Monica office, he explains explains why his company is targeting its content at professional Moms, why entertainment and celebrity news is a top priority, and why he's more interested in working with partners for music.

For more on Dossett, see the introduction to part one of our interview series.

Ben Fritz: When you talk about your audience, do you see it as everyone on the Internet? Do you think at this point that you need to make the Yahoo brand as relevant to an eight-year-old as to a really digital, Twittering, Facebooking 21-year-old, as to a 50-year-old parent who's only quasi-Internet-literate?

Jeff Dossett: I kind of refer to that as the billion dollar question.

On one hand, because of the sheer breadth and depth of the audience that interacts with the Yahoo network, it is representative of virtually everyone online, but within that large universe of users and consumers, we are identifying priority audience segments. We're doing a lot of work looking at “Who are we best serving?” from a content and media experiences perspective, and “Who are the audiences that advertisers are looking to connect their brands and their performance offers with?” and prioritizing the audience segments and tuning the programming and content experiences to those priority audiences.

We can't be all things to all people; we need to make some choices of which are the priority audiences. We enjoy a very unique position in the industry; the entire online audience is represented across Yahoo. We have the opportunity to select within that vast universe of users the priority audiences, and better serve them – maybe even attract more to the network – and it's not as if we'll disenfranchise the less prioritized audiences, but when we think about incremental investments and new experiences where we are going to place our innovation investments and bets, we'll be very targeted and very focused.

[CEO] Carol [Bartz] talks a lot about focus, and it's one of the great things she's brought to Yahoo; this constant, positive, constructive questioning about what are we going to focus on and why. Focus means different things to different people at different times. In some cases, it's “What should we do?” and “What should we not do?” and that's really around, “Where do we think we as Yahoo have the capability to do something unique, something differentiated, something that stands out from the pack?”

“That sounds like something that's good to focus on, we should do that.” If we're doing something where we're doing an okay job, but not an amazing job, we ask ourselves the question: “Should we increase our investment and focus on that to get it up to a number one or number two position, or should we do it differently?” – not necessarily not do it, but maybe do it differently – “Where can we better leverage a partner who can help us better serve that audience segment?”

In some cases, we'll say, “We're not particularly differentiated in what we do; we don't really know of another way to do it any better than we do it right now; we're not well servicing the audience segment; that's not constructive for the Yahoo brand and experience,” so we might not do it. Focus comes in a lot of different forms, but it's a very powerful tool.

BF: I'd love to drill into that a little, and maybe first talk about the audience. Can you maybe give some insight into what audiences you're prioritizing? Which ones you're looking at and saying, “This is the one we can really nail” and invest more in?

JD: There will certainly be more than one priority audience segment, and there are lots of different ways of defining audience segments. You can define them on demographic criteria, like gender, age, or something of that nature, or you can look more into needs, behavior and intent. If you take more of the demographic perspective, we over-index, if you will, on a couple of key categories.

A particular segment of the female online population, moms with one or more kids who live very busy lives. We often refer to them internally as “Chief Household Officers,” reflecting the complexity and breadth of their responsibilities both at home and professionally. It's an audience that's of very high interest to advertisers because they spend a lot of time online, they're very influential in a very high percentage of household purchases, and they're actually not well served online today. As an industry, we haven't made it easy for that audience segment to find the content that's relevant to them, that helps them make the decisions they need to make, help them be more productive, etc.

Observers in the traditional media industry can be excused for never quite getting what Yahoo was doing here in Los Angeles. Yahoo never seemed to quite know either.

Since its founding four years ago, the Santa Monica-based Yahoo Media Group, which houses all of the company's content production, has seen three executives come and go: Former ABC president Lloyd Braun and two of his deputies, Vince Broady and Scott Moore, who each minded the store for about a year before moving on. Braun pushed and the company abandoned a plan to produce network television-caliber programming. Broady's attempt to build "brand universes," destination pages built around top media brands like Harry Potter and Halo, was equally unsuccessful.

At the same time, Yahoo has had three CEOs -- former Warner Bros. chief Terry Semel, co-founder Jerry Yang, and current office holder Carol Bartz, who took over in January. There have been numerous reorganizations and executive shifts, along with layoffs, in an attempt to stem a slumping stock and challenge nimble competitors like Microsoft, Facebook, and of course Google.

Jeff Dossett is ready to put chaos in the rear view mirror. Tapped in November as senior VP of U.S. Audience -- a post that puts in charge of the Santa Monica office along with some businesses in the Sunnyvale corporate headquarters -- he oversees every consumer-facing business, from entertainment to news to the front page to search. Recruited from a similar job overseeing MSN for Microsoft (a post that was ironically filled by Scott Moore), he has brought a decidedly non-Hollywood style to the job, streamlining operations and focusing his staff's efforts on using technology to enhance their content and attract audiences, rather than try to compete with Hollywood programming or adopt their brands as his own.

There isn't even a Yahoo Media Group anymore, for all intents and purposes. Yahoo Santa Monica simply houses the content production components of the audience group, like movies, television, news and sports.

In his first major interview since he first took the job, Dossett spoke to Variety about how Yahoo can handle its competitors, work with traditional media, and produce original series in its own unique way.

In part one of a five part conversation, Dossett explains why leaving Microsoft for Yahoo was like moving to the "big leagues"  and how Yahoo can improve its content production and presentation by focusing on delivering key audience segments exactly what they want.

Ben Fritz: So how much time do you spend down here in Santa Monica?

Jeff Dossett: I live in Seattle, but I spend Mondays in the Sunnyvale head office, and then Monday nights I fly to LA and stay here for the rest of the week.

So basically four out of five days, and then multiple times, including this weekend, I stay through the weekend and – my wife's flying down, and one of my kids is flying down, and we love it here.

BF: Well before we get into what we're doing and how you see things, I wanted to sort of start with your coming here, which I think was November?

JD: November fourth or fifth.

BF: It seems you went from one job that was somewhat similar in scope to the same job at a different company. I'm kind of curious what motivated the move.

JD: I wanted to play in the big leagues. Really, that's the essence of it. I was executive producer of another major online portal, but really – this is Yahoo, and Yahoo is literally number one or number two in virtually every category it competes in, and that was an incredible opportunity to work with the largest, most engaged audience online. I think it's an amazing time in the industry, and leadership matters. It matters for the audience, and it matters for the advertisers, and really, being able to work with the assets Yahoo has, and figure out how to better package them and present them to meet the needs of audience and advertisers, was really just a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Despite all the time I'd spent in a previous role with a previous company, it was a very, very easy decision for me to make once the opportunity became available.

Forget development and pilots and going with your gut. Yahoo has a new approach to programming: Study what your audience wants, find an advertiser willing to pay, and come up with a program to match.

Can it work? And will the struggling network television business follow suit?

The online media giant is launching a new Web series called “Spotlight to Nightlight” (pictured the right with host Ali Landress) that focuses on celebrity motherhood (here's a sample episode). How did it come about? As this article in the New York Times explains, the folks at Yahoo noticed that articles about celebrity moms are particularly popular on its gossip site OMG. And lead sponsor State Farm was proactively looking for a new vehicle to reach women.

That approach is, of course, the exact opposite of what most networks and studios do in Hollywood. Sure, they engage in research and focus groups. But mostgreenlights are, more than anything else, based on decisions made by creative executives who mix relationships with talent and agents, knowledge of what has worked in the past, and their own tastes.

Former Yahoo Media Group head Lloyd Braun, who was entertainment president of ABC before taking that gig, had a similar approach. But to say it didn’t take off would be an understatement.Braun’s Hollywood style programs like “The Runner,” originally developed at ABC, never made it online. And the exec only lasted two tumultuous years on the job.

The new Yahoo, under audience group senior VP Jeff Dossett, is doing a 180. They’ve even canceled the one program Braun did launch, “The 9,” a round up of popular Web videos that was doing fairly well. But James Pitaro, a VP at Yahoo, told the Times that it wasn’t a “response to any specific audience demand.”

“Spotlight on Nightlight” is the new Yahoo’s second show, along with "Primetime in No Time,” which recaps a night of TV in a few minutes. Interestingly, both shows are tied to existing Yahoo brands -- OMG and Yahoo TV, respectively -- giving them a leg up in finding an audience and serving an additional purpose for the portal besides drawing eyeballs to video ads.

In Hollywood, of course, “nobody knows anything,” as William Goldman famously put it. That’s why we’re so often surprised by what turns into a flop and what’s a hit and why executives come and go for no real logical reason.

Yahoo, however, is better that by carefully researching what audience click on the Internet and working with sponsors from the outset, it does know something. It’s not exactly a formula for creative risk. But if it’s a formula for more reliable financial success, it may be a hard one to argue with.

We'll have more on Yahoo's new approach to entertainment here on Technotainment next week in an exclusive interview. Stay tuned.