At the start of the hour is season two of The Katering Show, a foul-mouthed and quite hilarious mock cooking program starring "a food intolerant and an intolerant foodie". At 9.20 (or thereabouts) is You Can't Ask That, in which "marginalised" Australians answer a bunch of questions posed anonymously online. At 9.37 is Soul Mates, a comedy series about two blokes who have been best friends since, like, forever. Literally.

All three shows are already on iView – not just the latest episode, but the whole series – and in the case of The Katering Show, they've been there for months.

All of them are created by people who got their break outside the usual TV channels. The Katering Show began as a web series on YouTube; Soul Mates is from Christiaan Van Vuuren and Nick Boshier, who became internet stars with their Bondi Hipsters sketches; and the producers of You Can't Ask That are Kirk Docker and Aaron Smith, who were plucked from obscurity by Andrew Denton to become part of the 19-strong team on Hungry Beast in 2009.

BFF: Nick Boshier and Christiaan Van Buren in Soul Mates.

They're all irreverent, unafraid of "earthy" language, and pitched at an audience willing to be challenged in their evening viewing. And while Soul Mates runs close to a standard 30 minutes per episode, The Katering Show and You Can't Ask That are more fluid, the former running from nine to 12 minutes, the latter from 16 to 27.

That variability is a legacy of their online origins, where it's the strength of the sketch and the weakness of the viewer's attention span that determines length, rather than the cookie-cutter slot in a TV network's schedule. It's also evidence the broadcasters no longer see themselves as being only in the television game, with all the constraints that implies. 

Kate McCartney, standing, and Kate McLennan in The Katering Show.

Increasingly, the gap between "social" broadcast platforms such as YouTube and Facebook and "mainstream" platforms (ie, the networks) is shrinking. For the most part it is the ABC and SBS leading the way, but Nine has joined the fray too with Plonk, a mock wine show starring The Chaser's Chris Taylor (the show also streams on Stan).

SBS recently screened the three-part series Wizards of Aus, a kind of low-budget Lord of the Rings comedy from bedroom special-effects genius Michael Shanks. It also commissioned two seasons of the lesbian romantic drama Starting From Now, which had already garnered a sizeable audience (about a million per episode) in the US over the course of its first three web-only seasons.

Meanwhile, DIY hot-rodders Marty Mulholland and Blair "Moog" Joscelyne have just parlayed their Mighty Car Mods YouTube series into a deal with Discovery's Turbo channel.

Nathan Earle, Chris Taylor and Joshua Tyler in Plonk.

For the broadcasters, picking up a web series or its stars holds out the hope of a pre-existing audience as well as material that has already been workshopped (to a degree, at least). The Mighty Car Mods guys, for instance, have almost 2 million YouTube subscribers, and have racked up more than 276 million views. The famous Thermomix episode of The Katering Show has been viewed more than 2.2 million times on YouTube, and shared who knows how many times via Facebook.

Marketing departments dream of exposure like that, even if not everyone will follow them to TV. "Inevitably you get some drop off, but how can it hurt to come with a pre-existing audience?" asks Mike Cowap, investment manager for interactive and multi-platform content at Screen Australia, which has invested in a range of producers attempting to make the leap from web to TV. "You can start from scratch but the network can only be in a better position if they have an existing audience base – and moving across from web to TV exposes them to a whole new audience as well."

Blair "Moog" Joscelyne and Marty Mulholland, stars of Mighty Car Mods.

It also gives them access to bigger budgets – though still small compared to traditional TV production – and higher expectations in terms of quality. For many producers, the move also feels like validation.

For all that, there's risk – for the producers perhaps more than the networks.

"There's a fear that their fans will accuse them of selling out, that they won't appreciate their slick new look," he says. "But providing they do something good, all will be forgiven."

Follow Karl Quinn on facebook at karlquinnjournalist or on twitter @karlkwin