A new YouTube-funded channel called the Jash Network has launched from a group of comedy creators led by producer Daniel Kellison, edgy comedienne Sarah Silverman, indie star Michael Cera and entertainers Reggie Watts, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. YouTube executives approached Kellison to be part of an initiative that is spending several hundred million dollars to develop high-quality original content for the site.

According to Kellison, the executives told him: “You’re gonna have 100 percent creative autonomy, you’ll never get a note from us, and you’ll own everything 100 percent,” reports Fast Company. “It sort of struck me as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said.

With Jash, Kellison hopes to take a celebrity-fueled YouTube channel seriously and to avoid “the fate of most celebrity YouTube channels that have failed to ignite, serving more as whimsical side gigs for busy TV stars like Amy Poehler and Sofia Vergara,” writes Fast Company.

This shift to online video makes sense right now. “In 2012, for the first time, Americans watched more movies via the Internet (through Netflix, Amazon, and Apple’s iTunes Store) than they did buying and renting physical DVDs,” explains the article. Additionally, the “global smartphone and tablet apps were an $11.7 billion market in 2012, according to Forrester Research, a total larger than the U.S. box office.”

And Kellison and Silverman are not the first. “This New Hollywood includes international movie stars such as Ben Stiller, talent agency chieftains such as William Morris Endeavor co-CEO Ari Emanuel, studio heads, and an emerging ‘Harvard digital mafia’ of 30-year-olds with high-profile gigs in finance, publicity, and startups,” explains the article.

Their collective focus is different from ordinary Hollywood standards. “Rather than pursue talent, the new obsession is intellectual property, content that the creator can own and repurpose forever,” writes Fast Company.

As former CAA agent turned tech investor Sandy Climan puts it: “The ecosystem is an intersection of worlds that’s never happened before. Old players are moving to new-media companies, while the people who service traditional media — studios, agencies — all have digital divisions. Google, Hulu, AOL all have big-studio stuff going on. New players are doing new things. And piling on, by people who don’t want to miss the new, new thing, goes hand in hand with the acknowledgment that the business is changing.”