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Can Yahoo! Get Ahead With New Project?

by Emma Goddard

As if you weren’t already trying to limit the number of shows you’ve been attempting to start altogether or to catch up with before your friends spoil all the season finales for you, there will now be another company bringing TV to you via the Internet. Soon to become a competitor with the masterminds of online programming, Netflix and Amazon, Yahoo! plans to air their own original series in the future.

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, has already been scoping out certain TV show projects, according to The Wall Street Journal, and the company hopes to pitch the idea at a NewFront marketing conference at the end of the month. With this, Yahoo hopes to encourage marketers attending the conference to put some of their TV Advertising budgets toward this project.

Mayer has reportedly already sifted through 100 ready-to-launch shows, hoping to find a mere four half-hour shows that will include 10 episodes each and “per-episode budgets ranging from $700,000 to a few million dollars,” according to Vulture. Although this is of course a huge deal for TV viewers everywhere, as it seems that online TV show viewing has become a more popular source of entertainment as opposed to sitting down to watch live TV shows, they have a lot of competition.

With shows like House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, and Alpha House proving to be popular series from Netflix and Amazon, Yahoo! will have to select their four series wisely if they want to rise to the occasion. Even Amazon has already greenlit six new projects recently, so there’s no doubt that reeling in an audience will take some effort. The question is, can they succeed in this online TV show war? We can only wait to see what happens.