One of Hollywood’s top five talent agencies has created an online unit devoted to scouting out up-and-coming creators of Internet content , particularly video , and finding work for them in Web-based advertising and entertainment, as well as in the older media, the New York Times reports.

The move by the United Talent Agency , best known as the home of comedians like Vince Vaughn and Jack Black, filmmakers like M. Night Shyamalan and television producers like Dick Wolf and David Chase , amounts to a bet, albeit a modest one, that Web video is on a growth curve similar to that of cable television a generation ago. It is also a return by Hollywood’s core talent representatives to the sort of new-media business they tested, without great success, at the peak of the dot-com boom.

The goal this time around, executives say, is not only to recruit the next generation of television and film writers and directors from the relative obscurity of sites like YouTube and Revver. It is also to help the major Web portals that are hungry for original content to find the creative people they need , just as movie studios have long turned to talent agencies when looking for new directors, screenwriters and actors.

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