When motion pictures were invented, at the end of the 19th century, most films were shorter than a minute, because of the limitations of the technology. A little more than a hundred years later, when Web videos were introduced, they were also cut short, for a very different reason.
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Producers, by and large, thought their audiences were impatient. A three-minute-long comedy skit? Shorten it to 90 seconds. And so it became the first commandment of online video: Web users would watch only bite-size video clips on their computers.
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New Web habits are defying that rule. As the Internet becomes a jukebox for every imaginable type of video — from baby videos to television dramas — producers and advertisers are discovering that users will watch for more than two minutes at a time.
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The viral videos of YouTube 1.0 — think dog-on-skateboard and cat-on-keyboard — are being supplemented with a new, more vibrant ecosystem of online video. Production companies are creating 10- and 20-minute shows for the Internet and writing story arcs for their characters — essentially, they’re acting more like television producers, while operating far outside the boundaries of a network schedule. Some are specifically introducing new shows this month with the knowledge that American TV networks generally show repeats and reality shows over the summer.
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Perhaps ironically, TV networks get much of the credit for the viewing behavior. In the past two TV seasons, nearly every broadcast show has been streamed free on the Internet, making users accustomed to watching TV online for 20 or more minutes at a time.
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People are getting more comfortable, for better or for worse, bringing a computer to bed with them, said Dina Kaplan, the co- founder of Blip.tv.
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Ms. Kaplan’s company distributes dozens of Web series. A year ago, all but one of the top 25 shows on…