Wednesday Yahoo Inc. has announced its decision to take its Internet radio service to CBS Corp. Beginning in February 2009, CBS will power Yahoo-owned Launchcast and sell ads on the service, but Yahoo employees will continue to control programming for the service.

CBS Radio already powers AOL Radio's streams, and now it made a similar deal with Yahoo, to combine the 150 streams from Yahoo's Launchcast with CBS Radio's more than 150 station streams. A new CBS Radio player will be incorporated into the Yahoo Music site, making Launchcast available to Firefox and Mac users for the first time.

The site today, which draws 3 million monthly unique visitors, allows users to listen to music based on preferred genres and artists. But Launchcast is still limited only to Windows users on Internet Explorer, shutting out a large percentage of the Internet. Well, not anymore.

As part of the deal, CBS will provide Yahoo Launch with music to stream, sell all of the service's ads and pay all royalties associated with the Launchcast channels, according to the Associated Press. Meanwhile, Yahoo's role in its own music streaming operation will be reduced to programming tunes from CBS's streaming catalog

In other words Yahoo will depend on CBS Radio to power Launchcast and sell all the ads on the service. Moreover as part of the alliance, CBS will stream some of its popular sports, news and talk stations to Yahoo pages. "Our agreement with CBS Radio will deliver Internet radio's most comprehensive and diverse collection of music, news and sports programming to Yahoo's massive audience," said Yahoo Sports and Entertainment vice president Jimmy Pitaro.

The new service will roll out sometime in the first quarter of 2009. Paid subscribers to Launchcast will receive a pro-rata refund. An ad-free version of Launchcast is available for $3/month or $24/year.

Yahoo shares fell 74 cents, or 6.5 percent, to $10.76 in Wednesday's afternoon trading while CBS shares gained 47 cents, or 7.3 percent, to $6.88.