When online entertainment company Break Media in Beverly Hills signed a deal with TV production firm Reveille LLC earlier this month, it was another step toward bringing professional television production values to digital media.

Reveille will produce comedies that appeal to Break’s target demographic of men 18 to 34. The shows are scheduled to be rolled out later this year.

Across Los Angeles, digital companies such as Break are increasingly looking to production shops such as Universal City’s Reveille, which produced broadcast hits such as “Ugly Betty” and “The Office,” to create a new kind of upscale online video.

A driving force behind the activity is the notion that digital productions will be competing for audiences with broadcast programming once Internet-enabled TV sets become more popular.

Break, which is partly owned by Santa Monica’s Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., operates nine websites, with content ranging from fashion advice to mixed-martial arts news, all aimed at young men. The company has about 200 employees, most in Los Angeles.

Reveille, which has 72 employees, is owned by London-based Shine Group, which recently shook up management at the company. In June, the company hired Eden Gaha, former executive producer of “Celebrity Apprentice,” as president. He joined David Anderson, who came to the company in January from Fox Audience Network, as head of digital at Reveille. Since then, Anderson has been reaching out to digital sites such as Break to sell production services.

“One of my main goals is to expand our distribution opportunities and find a home for as many ideas as possible,” Anderson said.

It was good timing. Break was looking to acquire more premium content for its sites. As part of that effort, the company hired Greg Siegel as vice president of entertainment development.

Break’s sites are still mostly filled with amateur videos shot and uploaded by users. The company started producing some videos in-house last year.

Break estimated in February that it would post about 1,000 original videos – self-produced or made by contract partners – on its sites this year. As of August, the company said it expects that number to increase by at least a thousand in response to demand from advertisers.

Break reaches an audience of a size that rivals cable TV networks, attracting about 140 million views a month. But ad dollars spent for online videos are still a fraction of what brands spend on broadcast television. The revenue gap remains the biggest unsolved problem for the nascent online video industry.

Marc Hustvedt, editor of TubeFilter, an online video trade publication based in Los Angeles, said advertisers have traditionally been wary of online video because the content doesn’t go through the same corporate vetting as traditional TV.

Siegel said Break delivers audiences that may fit better with the needs of certain advertisers that, for example, want to reach narrow groups such as NASCAR fans and gamers.

“We have a massive user base,” Siegel. “They live in different networks and wherever the content is right, we’ll distribute it.”

‘Advertiser partner’

At a recent media panel in Los Angeles, an industry insider predicted that Internet-enabled TVs would be increasingly popular in just a short time. As a result, web series need to increase in quality, said Jason Nadler, a co-founder of Santa Monica digital production and management company Serious Business.

Signing with Reveille gives Break credibility with advertisers, Nadler said, whereas many digital sites haven’t completely gained the trust of advertisers.

“Reveille has a reputation for being an advertising partner,” he said. “That reputation is the hardest thing to achieve in the web space.”

Reveille was founded in 2002 by Ben Silverman, who left the company in 2007 to take a job as co-chairman at NBC.

Now that Reveille and Break are partners, they will compete with another Silverman venture, L.A.-based Electus, a digital and TV studio founded in 2009.

Electus is a production partner of CollegeHumor Media, which targets a similar young-male online demographic as Break. Electus and CollegeHumor are both owned by New York media conglomerate IAC.

But CollegeHumor and Break aren’t the only digital properties looking to offer advertisers premium content.

YouTube, which recently opened an office in Beverly Hills, is offering Hollywood producers about $5 million to create original content for the site’s upcoming redesign, according to sources interviewed for this article. A YouTube spokeswoman in Palo Alto declined to comment on any potential deals.

West L.A.-based Hulu LLC also recently signed its first original programming deal earlier this month, with Morgan Spurlock’s New York production company, Warrior Poets. The show will be a documentary-style look at a day in the life of a celebrity. It will run 22 minutes, which is long in comparison with most web fare but comparable to a half-hour TV show. Hustvedt said long form is increasingly what’s in demand.

“Almost exclusively, buyers are looking for long form,” he said. “There’s a pivot away from the short, funny five minute comedy.”

In addition, as web video gets more sophisticated and run times lengthen, budgets will grow as well. A current industry budget estimate is for about $4,000 to $5,000 per minute, on the high side.

Anderson said digital budgets at Reveille are growing along with everyone else’s.

“I believe in the near future, there might not be a large difference between digital and TV,” he said. “The economics can be just as interesting.”