Yahoo! Setting Up Studio Space in New York City

Start spreading the news. YouTube isn’t the only company investing heavily in original programming. Another online destination with over 173 million unique monthly visitors in the US alone is building its own new studio in New York City to facilitate the creation of online originals.

Gerog Szalai at the Hollywood Reporter writes Yahoo! is in the midst of converting roughly 5,000 square feet of “gutted former conference room” space at the corner of 40th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan into “two sets, seven edit rooms, a state-of-the-art control room and a green room.”

Once complete in mid-March, the studio will be Yahoo’s first filming facility on the East Coast. The multinational internet corporation already has studios in both Sunnyvale and Santa Monica, California, where it shoots some of its most popular internally-produced programming, like omg Now, Prime Time in No Time, and Odd News.

Yahoo will use the studio in NYC to shoot East Coast programs already in production (including Trending Now, Daily Ticker, and Breakout) and add to its already extensive slate of original web series. Michael Manas, Head of Production Supervision at Yahoo! Studios New York, told Szalai the new facility will be used by every Yahoo vertical. That includes finance, sports, entertainment, women, men, fashion, and more.

In addition to quality in-house productions, Yahoo is distributing a handful of quality online original series filmed outside the company’s studio spaces. Shows like Morgan Spurlock’s Failure Club recently debuted on Yahoo’s recently revamped hub for video – Yahoo! Screen – and Fishbowl Media Worldwide’s Ultimate Proposal is doing quite well, racking up millions of views.