nullSpeaking of rich white owners of professional basketball teams…

At the 2014 Digital Content NewFronts, Yahoo! unveiled the first of its new original long-form shows.

“We are in a time of rapid and dramatic change in how people read and view content online. Our goal is to not only enable the future but also to help invent it,” said Kathy Savitt, CMO of Yahoo. “Yahoo is focused on connecting artists, storytellers, great content producers and brands with the audiences they want — at scale, across devices, every single day.”

Yahoo announced the first two original comedies in its new lineup of long-form shows. The new shows will join the growing collection of award-winning comedy programming available on Yahoo. Each series will launch on Yahoo Screen next year and will deliver 30-minute episodes viewers can enjoy all at once on the Yahoo Screen mobile app, desktop, or in their living rooms on Apple TV and Roku.

The two new comedies are:

– From hit TV executive producer Mike Tollin (One Tree Hill, Smallville  and Varsity Blues) and two-time Emmy nominated director Bryan Gordon (Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office), comes Sin City Saints – an off-beat comedy set in the front office of a fictional pro basketball expansion team. The show will revolve around Jake Tullus, a Silicon Valley tycoon whose lifelong dream was to buy a pro basketball team but quickly finds he’s in over his head. The series will follow the triumphs, travails, and transgressions of Las Vegas’ first major league sports franchise. Expect 8 half-hour episodes when it debuts.

– And second, from three time Emmy nominee Paul Feig (Freaks and Geeks, Bridesmaids, The Office), comes Other Space – a galactic adventure set in the early 22nd century, when the human race has mapped most of the known universe, failed to find alien life, and frankly gotten a little tired of the whole thing. A spaceship on a routine collection mission stumbles into the greatest discovery in history: an alternate universe, far stranger and way more dangerous than ours. Now the ship’s crew — a collection of overmatched rookies, feuding siblings, burned-out veterans and obsolete robots — has to explore this new universe to try and find a way back home alive. Also expect 8 half-hour episodes.

It’s really an exciting time to be a content creator – especially if you’re in demand, and/or have an established or growing audience. Competition between platform owners is high, as each pays up to draw the best talent, hoping that whatever they create will draw eyeballs. From Netflix, to Amazon, to YouTube, to even XBox and now Yahoo (to name a few), original scripted programming is the new black, and if you’re a content creator, you have to be excited about the possibilities.