The American wants to start commissioning his own programming, and work with broadcasters in unlocking their archives as part of a strategy to be “not a product company but a major distribution platform”.

Yahoo!, which began life as a simple internet search engine, has already begun showing television online. This month, the website gave a debut to Supernatural, a week before the show appeared on the WB Network in America.

However, Mr Semel indicated that he might want to cut the traditional broadcast network out of the process.

“I should assume that we will commission our own programming,” he said. “What will it look like? I don’t think it will look like broadcast — that’s too good. It has to have its own personality.”

Mr Semel, who ran the Warner Brothers film studio before joining Yahoo! as chief executive in 2001, aligned himself with on-demand, customergenerated content, arguing that the days when “we were the programmers, who decided what went on [TV]” were over.

“If you are an 18-year-old interested in film, you are not interested in what a 50 to 60-year-old critic thinks. You want to know what your buddy list thinks,” he said.

Mr Semel told an audience of Britain’s leading broadcasters at the Royal Television Society’s Cambridge Convention: “I totally invite people to look at companies like Yahoo!. We have a global platform.”

Yahoo! expects to have about 200 million “active users” by the end of the year, using services such as mail or web hosting. The company also believes that global internet advertising, currently worth $22 billion, is growing at 8 per cent a year, although it still accounts for only 3 per cent to 5 per cent of the total advertising market.

Mr Semel, on a rare visit to the UK, did not rule out acquiring a broadcaster.

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