New Form Digital, a video distribution/production company funded by Discovery, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, has launched its original pilot — “Oscar’s Hotel for Fantastical Creatures” — on Vimeo On Demand. The series, which began life as one of the dozen or so shorts that New Form commissions each year via its incubator program, includes Jim Henson’s Creature Shop-created beasts that run a magical boarding house, YouTube stars Chris Kendall, Grace Helbig and Hannah Hart, and appearances by Patrick Stewart and Alfred Molina.

The company creates projects that mix traditional Hollywood celebrities such as Lisa Kudrow and Mitchell Kreigman (“Clarissa Explains It All”) with streaming media personalities such as Mystery Guitar Man, Anna Akana and Sawyer Hartman, says TechCrunch.

New Form retains the option to launch any given pilot into a series co-produced and distributed online and is currently “testing out the exclusivity route to see if this is the right strategy for creating and monetizing online content.”

TechCrunch notes that, “the struggle to create online quality content has been about making the money to justify the creation.” Making a deal with Netflix isn’t easy, but self-made videos uploaded to video are constrained by lack of money to pay cast and crew.

“We really combine kind of the best of both worlds in the sense that we move really quickly, we work with talent that has an existing audience,” New Form’s chief creative officer Kathleen Grace told TechCrunch. “Whenever we have an idea we want to make bigger we think about all the people in our network that could potentially work with us on this.”