The new studio, Electus, is billed as one that “will connect advertisers, distributors and content creators early on in the development process, enabling marketers and advertisers to be a true partner in campaigns and content creation.” In other words, the ad guys call the shots.

The approach isn’t entirely new. While at NBC Universal, one of Silverman’s initiatives was tearing down whatever wall remained between network programming and advertising. His flop revival of “Knightrider” and the reality show “Restaurant” both oozed with content regarding their sponsors (Ford and American Express, respectively).

Electus also made a “first look” deal with Will Arnett and Jason Bateman’s ad-driven production company DumbDumb, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

The Yahoo and DumbDumb deals were announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.

“Yahoo is bringing together the worlds of entertainment and advertising to build differentiated experiences that help redefine branded entertainment,” buzz-worded Joanne Bradford of Yahoo in a press release announcing the Electus-IAC-Yahoo deal.

The embattled Silverman left NBC last fall, looking for a soft landing at Barry Diller’s IAC. This is the first major move since then.

Yahoo’s Media Group has been seeking to expand its activities in webisodes and similar scripted content, as CEO Carol Bartz tries to reinvent the Yahoo brand. Yahoo’s best trafficked online show is “Prime Time in No Time,” which dashes through highlights of the previous night’s primetime and late-night shows.

Silverman’s career caught fire while he was a William Morris talent agent in London. He formed an independent production company, Reveille, which imported “The Office” (from the U.K.) and “Ugly Betty” (from Colombia).

Silverman was hired to run the TV unit of NBC Universal, but his tenure took a hit during the writers strike and fizzled out after a couple of years. His contract was not renewed last summer. Time magazine summed up his performance by dubbing him the “No-Hit Hitmaker.”

The decision to move Jay Leno into the 10 p.m. primetime slot was made by Silverman’s boss, Jeff Zucker, but the entertainment chief failed to defend his 10 p.m. turf.

“Prom Queen: Season 1″ & “Prom Queen: Summer Heat” were released this week on a two-disc DVD by Shout! Factory, the folks who put out the acclaimed “My So-Called Life” box set.

The “Prom Queen” DVD runs 315 minutes and goes for $17.99 on Amazon.

The teen series also has been available on Amazon’s streaming media and download service at $3.99 for rental and $9.99 to own.

Fans, of course, could save their money and see the show with a bit of hassle: The episodes remain online, for free with ads, on the “Prom Queen” site. During its 80-episode run on MySpace, the series was sponsored by the likes of New Line and Fujii water. Episodes whizzed by at 90 seconds each.

The DVD experiment could point to a new source of revenue and pre-production financing (via rights) for web-series makers. Still, it’s hard to see how the title will sell outside of dedicated fans and impulse buyers. It’s an interesting reverse take on aging TV shows taking their last gasps as free online fodder for sites like Hulu.

Eisner’s new-media studio Vuguru produced the show in association with the webisode creatives at Big Fantastic (”Sam Has 7 Friends”). Not to be confused with “Prom Queen” the 2005 movie about a gay guy who just wants to go to the prom with his beau.

“Foreign Body,” the book, comes to market following a 50-episode online prequel from the four guys at Big Fantastic who brought us “Prom Queen” and “Sam Has Seven Friends.” Five episodes go live each week, to the tune of two minutes each.

The promo scheme was put together by Michael Eisner’s Vuguru and Putnam Books, a first of sorts with old media picking up the trail of new media. Big Fantastic shot the web series in under a month.

The first “Foriegn Body” webisode just went live on the project’s web site, taking a mere 60 seconds to get a beauty into her underwear, sex traveling at the speed of “Prom Queen.”

The action begins in New Delhi, India, where a mysterious hot nurse puts a mysterious injection into an older woman, who seems fast-tracked for the final suprise. The nurse works for “cutthroat medical entrepreneurs” for “their own mysterious ends.” A mystery, apparently. Something to do with medical tourism. (Spoiler here.)

Then it’s off to Malibu, where “dangerous Indian beauties” advance the plot by frolicking in the surf (possibly outside Eisner’s digs).

There’s your two-minute fix. Short Attention Span Theater. Let me know how it turns out, will you?

There’s something vaguely appropriate about the 100th post on Download Movies 101 going to online video star Amanda Congdon.

We all remember Rocketboom, the wacky tacky daily news report with Amanda in the anchor seat, spinning around a lot with hair close behind. After a couple of years, there came a bunch of weirdness with the show’s creator. She split in a hurry, went on a video-blogging road trip and eventually landed on ABC News’ web site, where nothing of note appears to have transpired. That lasted about a year. So was it all just Rocketboom, not Amanda?

Whatever. Our gal is back with Sometimesdaily, an “offbeat interactive variety show exploring life’s themes through the inquisitive eyes of Amanda Congdon.” It’s hosted on the 4-year-old video sharing platform Vimeo, which got into HD late last year.

Amanda’s new introductory piece looks sort of promising. She’s sharing the stage with her brother and some other young irony seekers. The real deal starts up Monday, meaning an update to this post will go right about … here.

Update: Amanda and Co. have posted two short videos. One OK, one borderline awful. (A commentator called the acting “pornified,” which only makes sense if you’ve seen porn stars try to act.)

Both videos start off with a new-agey intro that looks right out of an infomercial shop.

Video 1‘s dream sequence brings Cogdon back to an alternate Rocketboom set, declaring, “I’m going to be talking about a lot of random shit you don’t care about, every day.” She wakes up screaming and proclaims, “How 2004.” Then goes into a minute of political commentary.

Video 2 features her gal-pal co-stars as they try to rouse Cogdon from some serious funk. It’s … pretty awful.

Both videos had some initial streaming stuttering as they tried to get started. Cogdon writes that they are working up a new web site and “are definitely in beta” with video formats.

I’ll be checking back with Sometimesdaily now and then, hoping for better.

“Quarterlife” is all done at NBC.

The webisode series from the creators of “thirtysomething” drew a measly 3.1 million viewers in its debut on the network Tuesday night. Those are the worst numbers in that primetime slot in decades, since anyone can remember. In trade talk, that’s a 1.3 rating/4 share. Yikes.

“It never should have been a network show,” co-creator Marshall Herskovitz told students at Harvard the morning after the bomb fell. (The “Quarterlife” segments did fit perfectly into a one-hour slot, however. Hmm)

Give NBC credit for looking to the Web for some experimental programming as the writers strike dragged on. Of course, Herskovitz and partner Ed Zwick know how to make hit shows, so it wasn’t like the peacock’s suits turned to “The Adventures of the Star Wars Kid” or “The Ysabella Brave Musical Hour.” (Both of which could be an improvement on some primetime shows.)

“Quarterlife” apparently will be back on television via Bravo, the cable arts channel owned by NBC Universal.

The web series is up to episode 30something now, with a solid and active fan base. Having 3 million people take a look is a good thing for the show, at least, when you consider episodes draw something like 100,000 people.

The show can be found on the “Quarterlife” web site and on MySpace. (Being professionally hip, the web show’s site is still in “beta” after five months.)

NBC chieftain Ben Silverman told the Hollywood Reporter: “The Web site traffic went up a huge amount and we continue to try new things and new models,” he said. “It’s very inexpensive but we hoped for higher ratings.”

As for Herskovitz and Zwick, they’re asking online viewers to upload their own shows for a chance to work with the old pros.

Did viewers really mind all that much that the bedroom vlogger was an actress, playing out her little dramas in front of the writer and producer?

With Lonelygirl15, it was like going to the carnival and finding out the snakeman wasn’t really a reptile, just some weird guy with some scales stuck to his scalp. Sometimes it’s fun to be a sucker.

Now comes news that “Quarterlife,” the webisode series from “thirtysomething” creators Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, actually is going on the air — picked up by NBC. Imagine that. How handy that the chapters in each episode add up to the same time occupied by an hourlong network show. And because of the way “Quarterlife” was produced outside the studio system, it appears to be “strike safe” to air.

Yes, this could be a case of serendipity. If the networks turned to the bustling world of Web video looking for replacement material, no doubt the project had a giant neon sign attached to it. Nothing produced so far for the Internet can compete with “Quarterlife” quality-wise. And since the trusted brand of Herskovitz &Zwick made the show as independents, the pickup seems a no-brainer.

But then there’s this: “quarterlife” debuted on MySpace a week ago. The deal with NBC Universal “had been finalized before the (writers) strike” started Nov. 5, The L.A. Times reported.

Herskovitz told the paper the network deal hadn’t been announced partly because no time slot had been set aside. This apparently more important than coming clean to the fawning media that the show was no longer a Web-only property. The Times noted yesterday that ” ‘Quarterlife’ has benefited from reams of favorable press coverage as a pioneer of quality drama on the Web.”

And so at least a week passed with “Quarterlife” headed for the bigs while its makers claimed or implied cool Internet-only status.

The L.A. Times published a curtain-raising story a week ago that made no mention of a network deal or the possibility of one. That Times story of Nov. 11 had this exchange about a sneak preview at USC:

After the screening — which previewed the first hour of “Quarterlife,” in eight-minute segments — audience member Frank Chindamo, an adjunct lecturer at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, asked Herskovitz a simple question:

”To me it looked exactly like an hour of TV with six commercial breaks in it,” Chindamo said. “Did you do that on purpose?”

Herskovitz didn’t hesitate.

”You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” he said.

”I don’t know how to create real emotion in less than an hour — I know how to do it in two hours, I know how to do it in an hour — I don’t know how to do it in a half-hour, and I really don’t know how to do it in eight minutes. So we made a decision to stick with what we know.”

There are several layers of uncharitable interpretation available here; connect the dots according to your level of cynicism.

Two decades in the Hollywood trades tells me the snake man is alive and well and vlogging away.

Good show anyway. Be sure to check out “Quarterlife” before your Tivo gets involved.

The venues for the 8-minute show are MySpace and quarterlife.com. MySpace gets dibs, in a bid to access the social network’s massive audience.

“We only care about our site,” Herskovitz said at a recent USC screening (according to the L.A. Times). “We don’t care about MySpace, because they’re not paying us. But they’re bringing us a lot of eyeballs, so it’s worth something.”

quarterlife.com calls itself “A new community for artists, thinkers, and doers.” Visitors are invited to create profiles, and then upload videos and images. But mostly it’s home to a great-looking screen on which to unspool the series. The trailer shows young people getting through life together and blogging about it. “You blog to exist,” the lady says to the audience. Yeech.

This stuff looks familiar, straight from the network template for young adult women. No doubt “quarterlife” has heart and no doubt it’s manipulative. The show might be good but don’t expect a format breakthough from these guys.

Herskovitz, you may or may not recall, created “My So-Called Life,” just released on DVD by Shout! Factory. Before that, it was the critical favorite “thirtysomething,” the model for hip family dramas such as “Brothers and Sisters.” He did these shows with his longtime partner Edward Zwick.

Paying for the new twentysomething series are big league advertisers such as Toyota and Pepsi.

Herskovitz wrote an opinion piece for the Times announcing that he and Zwick were done with network television. “Networks today exert a level of creative control unprecedented in the history of the medium …,” he said. “The problem, of course, is that these executives often have little background or qualification for making creative decisions. … This season’s new shows have been a good indicator of how successful that strategy is.”

He went on about the importance of the “quarterlife” experiment:

“We’ve worked very hard, and spent a great deal of our own money, to make it as good as anything we’ve ever done on television. And we’ve gotten calls from every guild and virtually every producer we know, all of whom are curious to see if this little experiment can succeed. Because if it does, it will prove that there’s a way to independently produce, finance and distribute ambitious content on the Internet.”

Of course, Herskovitz and Co. have the money and power to bolt from the nets and make a credible Internet series. Pretty much everyone else wanting to work in professional episodic video has no choice but to work for Big Media.

YouTube fun aside, the reality is almost all of the (legal) watchable stuff on the Web comes from real television. The networks repurpose their shows without additional compensation for the people who created that content. That’s what the current writers strike is all about.

One theory I’ve heard here in L.A. is that the networks are in no hurry to settle the walkout because they’re saving money they would have poured into their new crop of flop shows. Reality TV is cheap, relatively, and enough viewers will put up with it to keep the ads coming. Check out these comments about the strike savings from Peter Chernin, president of Fox parent News Corp.

The networks seem to be enjoying their speedy downhill ride. The strike’s disruptions to their primetime shows — and the defection of major talent such as Herskovitz & Zwick — are just two more bits of inspiration for viewers to conclude they have better things to do than watch network TV. Power off.

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During its 80-episode run on MySpace, the series was sponsored by the likes of New Line and Fujii water. Episodes whizzed by at 90 seconds each. The Unbox feature version runs 2 hours-plus, without commercials. The series follows five prom queen candidates as they cope with “love, gossip and betrayal.” The finale came a few weeks ago with the big dance debacle. A new series with the same cast is set in Mexico and debuts in August.

“Prom Queen” received broadband Emmy nominations the past two years. Eisner’s new media studio Vuguru produced and distributed in association with the webisode creatives at Big Fantastic (“Sam Has 7 Friends”).

Co-creator Chris McCaleb told The Daily Reel, “Perhaps the greatest value the Internet has yet offered is the ability for anyone with a great idea and a camera to show their work to the world.”

Eisner’s non-statement on the Unbox deal reads: “By teaming with Amazon Unbox, we are making it possible for ‘Prom Queen’ fans to download and watch the entire series as a feature-length title whenever they want. The wonderful thing about producing in the new-media landscape is that fans can reach shows like ‘Prom Queen’ on a number of platforms. Amazon Unbox gives shows like ‘Prom Queen’ longevity and serves as a new mass medium and unique way for the show’s followers to watch.”

Amazon’s digital video download service requires Windows XP or Vista and works via TiVo’s computer-connected boxes. Sorry, forward-thinkers, no Macs allowed.