Telemundo, the Spanish TV channel owned by NBC Universal (NYSE: GE), is going solo on the online side. Well, sort of. It is ending its two-year partnership with Yahoo (the Yahoo Telemundo portal) as of January 1, 2009, and launching a standalone hub at Telemundo.com. The new site will incorporate social media features, video from both Telemundo and NBCU programs, as well as distinct sections that advertisers can sponsor. The kicker is that Telemundo is buddying up with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) in Yahoo’s place for distribution. Some Telemundo.com content will run across MSN Latino and other MSN international portals; and the site will use MSN’s ad serving and video technology. The news comes after Telemundo unified its various digital media divisions in August.

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—Why go solo now : “We partnered with Yahoo because they offered huge reach, scale and technology, but for the most part we brought the content,” said Alfredo Richard, Telemundo’s VP, Corp Comm. “It was great for us in terms of getting visibility—and we couldn’t have done it without Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). But with more than 10 million unique users every month, we’ve got enough reach that we can do it on our own now.”

We’ll post Microsoft and Yahoo’s responses as we get them.