The acclaimed web series High Maintenance got picked up for a second season with funding from Vimeo. This is Vimeo's first foray into an original web series.

Everybody in tech is getting into the original content game. That's the nature of video and TV: licensing is expensive and usually not economically attractive (see wholesale transfer pricing), so eventually players of sufficient audience look upstream, into financing their own content so they can capture the lion's share of profits available in the first window.

Seems tough to do with a one-off series of niche appeal like this, however.