Yahoo! has been cultivating an impressive array of content, from the archives of “Saturday Night Live” to original projects featuring stars like John Stamos and Jack Black, for a while now. Until this week, however, it had yet to make all that great stuff easy to watch.

Enter Yahoo! Screen, a new iOS app that, according to the media giant, “reimagines video for mobile.” That’s a lofty way of saying the app is a hub through which you can now watch Yahoo! videos on your phone, which probably should have been possible, given the allegedly trendsetting company behind it, months ago. Fortunately, Yahoo! is making up for lost time with a recently announced high-profile partnership with Viacom that will add to Screen’s portfolio Comedy Central clips from the likes of “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report” and other fine humorous fare.

Attempting to recreate the daily experience of channel surfing, Yahoo announced through its blog that “we’ve built Screen as a simple, intuitive experience that turns your finger into a remote control.” This means simply that the app is gesture-based, allowing the user to switch between episodes by swiping left or right, or change channels by swiping up and down. It’s not an exactly revolutionary concept, but the intuitive simplicity of the interface is appealing.

While Yahoo! has a lot of ground to make up if it’s going to hang with Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and the other video content heavyweights, it’s been interesting to observe its growing fixation on comedy. It’s hard to envision Yahoo! Screen pushing the company into the major leagues of content provision, but the app will certainly help showcase all this funny content the company is throwing together. Yahoo! may never be king in this space, but it seems to be carving out a nice little niche kingdom of its own.

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