Very quietly, under cover of broadband, Yahoo! yesterday purchased Maven Networks, Inc. of Cambridge for approximately $160 million.

The sale itself isn’t so much of interest, it’s what the technology will mean to Yahoo! as they drive towards competing (if you can still call it that) with Google.

The partnerships created by Maven include Fox News and Hearst, so the client list is impressive enough. The video on demand (for professional media companies) is still lacking and seems to be a wide-open market. Without any hard data to go on, I’d love to see how advertising numbers look for on-demand Web video, what the conversion rates are for sports versus news, etc…

Unfortunately, those numbers are hard to get unless you work for the actual media company.

This should at the very least give Yahoo! a proven technology that allows them to best use their advertising department to alter the revenue models and build another cash queue.