How to make this

The stars of the online universe came out for the would-be Oscars of the future.

Larry King and Jenna Marbles present the award for Best First Person Series.

Image by Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images

It wasn't a coincidence that the Streamy Awards took place on Sunday at the Hollywood Palladium — exactly one week before, and blocks away from the spot where the Hollywood establishment will celebrate their biggest night of the year, the Oscars. If anything, the proximity was meant as a challenge to the august motion picture Academy.

This year's Streamys was to "commemorate the arrival of online video as one of the pillars of entertainment with television, music and movies," according to Drew Baldwin, CEO of the website Tubefilter, which three years ago, created the ceremony celebrating the best in online video.

The ceremony also commemorated the awkward and often contentious relationship budding between the online video world and traditional Hollywood.

In his opening monologue, host Chris Hardwick called web video's distribution model "the most significant global paradigm shift since the industrial revolution." This idea — that platforms like YouTube offer creators the opportunity to circumvent gatekeepers who might have excluded them from the entertainment industry in the past — was echoed throughout the night by both winners accepting Streamys, the presenters doling them out, and even during the commercial breaks. "Hollywood has really big gates around it and I think we're cheating it by going around," one video creator announced in a montage paid for by Maker Studios and broadcast during the ceremony.

For all the tough talk though, content created by Hollywood studios and stars still earned top honors. Paramount's web series Burning Love, was the night's big winner, taking home Streamys for Best Male Performance, Best Ensemble Cast and Best Comedy Series. Tom Hanks' Electric City won for Best Animated Series. AMC's The Walking Dead: Cold Storage won for Best Derivative Series.

Mainstream pseudo celebrities paired with YouTube celebrities to dole out the awards: Jenna Marbles and Larry King, George Takei and Ashley Clements, Lance Bass and the Fine Brothers (there were also appearances by minor characters from Glee and NCIS).

The idea, Baldwin said, was to follow the lead of other awards shows by introducing upcoming talent alongside established talent. The move, though, left some in the ballroom (and online) grumbling that they wished the show was less about gimmicky appearances by Vanilla Ice and David Hasselhoff and more about the online video community.

The show's special guests, the slick set design, the steady pacing were a far cry from the first Streamys, remembered by some guests as amateur affair and rife with production snafus (one guest recalled the host repeatedly calling out "roll the video!" to no response; an embarrassing miss at a show celebrating video production). The improvement was courtesy of Dick Clark Productions (responsible for the Golden Globes, among other awards shows), brought on to produce the show for the first time this year.

For all production value Dick Clark brought to the table, however, there was one part of the Streamys that would never happen at the Globes or the Oscars: commercials broadcast in the ballroom throughout the show.

The most ubiquitous ads came courtesy of Maker Studios and Machinima (both multichannel networks have venture capital funds to burn, having closed fundraising rounds worth $36 milllion and $35 million, respectively). Baldwin declined to disclose how much revenue those advertisements, which also ran during the show's online broadcast, cost those networks or generated for Tubefilter.

It was hard not to notice that, in between the commercial breaks dominated by advertisements for Maker and Machinima, programs made by those same networks were winning many of the night's top honors. (Maker Studios' KassemG won for Best Host, Epic Rap Battles of History took home awards for Best Online Musician and Best Use of Fashion and Design, while Machinima-made Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn won for Best Drama Series, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Production Design.)

When asked how large a role the show's advertisers might have influencing the award winners, Baldwin answered, "Although there were representatives from all the major studios that are producing, the majority of the blue ribbon panel are independent producers so there wouldn't be voting along party lines."

The "blue ribbon panel" to which Baldwin referred selects all the Streamy winners, save the two audience choice awards. Their names are not public, but Baldwin said the voters are a "hand-picked" group of video creators and executives from both the online video and the traditional entertainment worlds — "about 100" individuals total.