NEW YORK, NY — Video is an essential part of Yahoo's business, CEO Carol Bartz told me yesterday at the company's news conference here.

She said, a "big cornerstone of our strategy is video."

According to Nielsen, Yahoo! served over a quarter billion streams to 28 million unique users in August. While small compared to YouTube's 7 billion videos, much of the Yahoo! video inventory is premium content which is associated with advertising. 

Bartz was in town for a big media and trade blitz during Advertising Week.  Yahoo! and AOL were both extremely visible this week, both competing hard for ad dollars, as Emily Steel reports in the Wall Street Journal.

Here's our interview with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong.

We will publishing several video interviews with Yahoo! video executives over the next few days.

Andy Plesser, Managing Editor