CALIFORNIA, USA — YAHOO is auditioning for a bigger role on iPhones and iPads with the release of its first mobile application tailored for watching video on touch-control screens.

The app, called Yahoo Screen, is set up to make the experience of sifting through video on smartphones and tablet computers more like channel surfing on a television. Instead of relying on a TV remote control, users of the Yahoo Screen app unveiled Monday will use their fingers to flip through programmes and sort through roughly 20 different channels separated into categories such as celebrities, sports, games and food.

The app is available only for Apple Inc’s iPhone and iPad, but Yahoo Inc intends to develop a version compatible with the much larger universe of devices powered by Google’s Android software.

Yahoo Screen is the latest offshoot of company CEO Marissa Mayer’s crusade to make Yahoo’s services part of their daily routines. Mayer has been emphasising the need for better mobile applications and more compelling video since Yahoo lured her away from a top executive job at Google 14 months ago.

The new app was built in New York by an engineering team led by Robby Stein, whose expertise was imported last October when Yahoo bought his start-up, Stamped, for an undisclosed amount. It marked the first of about 20 acquisitions that Mayer has made as Yahoo’s CEO and reunited her with Stein, who had previously worked at Google before launching his start-up.

“This gives us a great product in a key area of people’s lives,” Stein said of Yahoo Screen. “Watching video has become something people do almost as much as they check e-mail and we think we have come up with something that is as intuitive to use as your TV.”

To trumpet the arrival of its video app, Yahoo also is rolling out eight comedy series made exclusively for its website along with clips from more than 700 episodes of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” broadcast during the past 38 years. Yahoo announced its deals to show the “Saturday Night Live” highlights and the new comedy series in April. As part of a new deal with Viacom Inc. revealed Monday, Yahoo Screen also will show clips from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report and MTV News.

Borrowing a concept popularised by Netflix’s Internet video subscription service, Yahoo is releasing all the episodes of the new comedy series at once so viewers can watch the instalments in rapid succession if they want.

Netflix’s decision to simultaneously release the episodes of exclusive series as House of Cards and Orange Is The New Black has proved so popular that it has intensified a phenomenon known as binge viewing.