Yahoo has launched a "new and improved" video site that offers user-uploaded content and professionally made music videos and news, sports and entertainment clips.

Yahoo Video, revamped on Friday, contains a number of improvements over the previous version, including a larger viewer, support for files up to 150 MB, and a "my video" section for users to upload, store, and share the content they create and compile playlists that can also be shared with others. It's not clear what day this week the site was launched.

In terms of number of viewers, Yahoo is third in the United States with about half as many as market leader Google, which gets nearly all of its traffic from the Web's most popular video site YouTube, according to ComScore. Fox Interactive Media is the second most popular site. In December, nearly 141 million Americans viewed an average of 3.4 hours of online video, a 34% increase since the beginning of 2007.

Yahoo's approach to video appears scattered. Rather than have all its offerings on one site, the company this month launched a separate service called Yahoo Live, which lets people stream their video on the site as its recorded through a webcam on a computer.

A unique feature in the service, which Yahoo calls an "experimental release," is the ability to see people watching the same video, assuming their Web cams are linked to the service. In addition, there's live chat while the video is playing.

At the bottom of the new Yahoo Video, under a section called "more with video," there is a link for sharing content on Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing site. Despite the link, video cannot yet be uploaded to the site, and Yahoo has not said when such a capability would be added.

Also this month in online video, Yahoo announced the $160 million acquisition of Maven Networks, which provides technology for delivering content and ads to more than 30 media companies, including Fox News, Gannett, The Financial Times, Hearst, E.W. Scripps, and CBS Sports. Fox News clips are available through Yahoo Video.