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The Media Equation

Yahoo Rolls the Dice on TV

The set of the HBO series “Silicon Valley.” “Telling stories requires lots of skills,” says Mike Judge, center, the show’s creator.Credit...Jaimie Trueblood/HBO

Yahoo, a company that seems like a permanent adolescent in search of an identity, is about to try a new persona: high-quality television programmer.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the company’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, is “looking for series that are ready to launch and don’t require a lot of development.”

Well, aren’t we all?

At a time when the culture is addicted to high-end television narratives, Yahoo wants in on the action, partly because while its site may have (flat) traffic — 700 million global visits a month — and (declining) revenue, it has zero cachet and no discernible way forward.

For many years, digital media players watched longingly as HBO and then AMC, FX and Showtime managed to rise above the clutter on television, where Americans still spend five hours a day. So last year, when Netflix broke through with “House of Cards,” it made sense that companies like Amazon, Hulu and Yahoo would want to follow suit.

There are signs that it is working — streaming for Amazon Prime tripled in the last year and the company has introduced its own device, Fire TV, which will fight for shelf space in your home along with Apple TV, Chromecast and Roku. At the same time, Comcast is seeking a merger that will give it the scale to invest in technology, and HBO Go is pushing to follow the consumer onto mobile. “People always want to be what they aren’t,” said Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed when we discussed the crisscross the other day.

The prize is dear. Winning in the distribution of high-end content is about mining an audience, and you can’t blame technology companies for believing they have relevant skill sets.

Silicon Valley has capitalized on its ability to create compelling software that animates devices and, very often, the people sitting in front of them. Surely, industry executives believed, they could head down the coast 400 miles and make a different kind of software using stars and sophisticated production values with some success. How hard could it be?

The answer is, very hard indeed.

“It is the pure arrogance of the newly rich and the newly powerful to think content is easy,” said John Landgraf, chief executive of FX Networks, which has had success with “Justified” and “The Americans.” “Breaking through in a cluttered marketplace requires expertise in all of the elements of storytelling. There are so many ways it can go wrong.”

It can be done, as HBO has demonstrated. Right now, in spite of all the competitors who are trying to eat its lucrative lunch, the premium cable service is crushing it. “Game of Thrones,” a fantasy-inspired epic, has become an unlikely bona fide hit, with 6.6 million people tuning in for the premiere of its fourth season. “True Detective,” a moody swamp-noir set in Louisiana, became a much-talked about win this winter, and “Silicon Valley” is about to have a moment, nailing the greedy hippie ethos that makes the tech world such a compelling, silly place. Comedies like “Veep” and “Girls” did well enough to earn their spots as well as their renewals.

But in the years leading up to those successes, not even HBO seemed able to be HBO. Using its tried and true formula of funding proven auteurs, the network followed up “The Sopranos” with “Luck,” “John From Cincinnati” and “Treme” — shows that it was equally proud of, but that failed to connect with an audience. A company executive described the period as “those years we don’t talk about.”

I have covered television (and film) long enough to know that wandering around Sunset Boulevard with a big bag of money shopping for programming is more likely to result in a mugging than a hit show. It requires connections in the agency world, technical muscle, moody writers, fragile stars — the list goes on. And even if you navigate all those shoals adroitly — spending large amounts of money the whole way — there also has to be some luck, a serendipitous grab of the zeitgeist. It’s a tough racket.

Hollywood and Silicon Valley regard each other with mutual suspicion. The entertainment industry is viewed as a metric-free place of profligate whimsy by the engineering culture, and the valley is seen as a place that has no regard for intellectual property and a profound lack of taste.

“Say what you will about Hollywood, the mechanism for finding talent is actually pretty good,” said Mike Judge, a former programmer in Silicon Valley who went on to make “Beavis and Butt-Head,” “Office Space” and, most recently, HBO’s “Silicon Valley.”

“People in Silicon Valley are generally smarter than people in Hollywood, but it takes a different kind of intelligence to make television, especially a lot of it, and do it well,” Mr. Judge said. “Telling stories requires lots of skills, not just making people laugh, but also who does the best color correction.”

Yahoo is especially unplugged from that world. In her move to differentiate on quality, Ms. Mayer has looked at more than 100 projects and is leaning hard on Kathy Savitt, Yahoo’s chief marketing officer, according to The Journal. But neither has much significant history in the entertainment business, and Mickie Rosen and Erin McPherson, two executives familiar with the media business, recently left the company.

This is not the first time that Yahoo has made a big push into Hollywood — in 2004, it had a well-covered foray into major productions with major stars, an effort that ended in naught.

“This is a very hard business with a very high reward,” said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Yahoo feels compelled to do it because of problems that they have and the opportunity it represents, but they have a lot less skill and knowledge than the other players.”

He added, “Finding a big audience that uses you to make their life easier or more convenient, as Yahoo has by creating something useful, is very different than providing a cultural experience that scratches a very deep part of the brain.”

“House of Cards” is a great aiming point for other digital players, but that achievement was not easy. Begin with the fact that Netflix was able to collect years of data on consumers through its video-rental service. It already had a significant distribution platform in television, something that Yahoo, which lives on desktop and mobile, sorely lacks.

Netflix booked David Fincher, a director with proven commercial and creative credentials, to produce the series, then pushed it into the public consciousness with a blunt-force marketing campaign on and off the service.

Before “House of Cards,” Netflix made “Lilyhammer,” which entered the water like an Olympic dive, without so much as a ripple. Two series that followed, “Hemlock Grove” and “Arrested Development,” came and went without a lot of bounce. “Orange Is the New Black” may have turned heads, but it will be years before Netflix has the kind of batting average that will put it in the front ranks of programmers.

The list of technology companies that have prospered over the long haul in entertainment is short. I can think only of what Apple’s Steve Jobs did with Pixar before selling it to Disney. In that case, vast processing power was paired with an absolute devotion to great stories. No other lasting success comes to mind.

For Yahoo, changing lanes from creating and hosting short-form video content to making lush, dramatic narratives is a bit like expecting a good sprinter to run a marathon.

With all the money sloshing around, maybe it’s time I consider pitching a series of my own. In the one I’m thinking about, the much-lauded chief executive of a tech company decides to go Hollywood in search of an identity and any kind of win. High jinks, plenty of mordant humor and a trail of tears ensue.

Email: carr@nytimes.com; Twitter: @carr2n

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Yahoo Rolls the Dice on TV. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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