As the space shuttle Discovery orbited the Earth in early August, 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 the U.S. space agency find a way to bring the astronauts home safely?

Despite the drama and the huge number of users, Lloyd Braun, the television impresario hired last year to oversee Yahoo’s media operation, was not satisfied. All Yahoo was offering its users, he 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.

This is a large article with lots to ponder. We are, after all, a noisy part of the audience these guys want to reach.

All this Hollywood frenzy begs 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 more akin to Warner’s parent, Time Warner, which mixes content like Warner and CNN with distribution, like its cable systems. Yahoo is both of those and a lot of software, too.

Semel describes a strategy built on four pillars: First, there is search, of course, to fend off Google, which has become the fastest-growing Internet company around. Next comes community, as he calls the vast growth of content contributed by everyday users and semiprofessionals like bloggers. Third, there is the professionally created content that Braun oversees – made both by Yahoo and other media providers. And last is personalization technology to help users sort through vast choices to find what interests them.

Increasingly, Semel and others are finding the long promised convergence of television and computers, 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. Already, video search engines, run by Yahoo and others, have indexed more than one million clips, and only now are the big media outlets like Viacom and Time Warner moving to put some of their quality video online.

[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 in the world get there first.