Yahoo! Screen: 'Community' Cancelled After Streaming Service Shuts Down?

After trying out the on-demand streaming craze through Yahoo! Screen with little success (and poor performance from their original content shows), the tech giant has officially axed the service in the early days of 2016, a move that almost certainly means bad news for the revived Community series and possible movie.

Variety was the first to report that the Yahoo! streaming service had been shut down after it had made the company lose millions of dollars, as in late 2015 Yahoo! declared that their attempt at streaming had led to a $42 million writedown.

After attempting to bring up their streaming game by renewing the cult show Community, as well as streaming an NFL game overseas and even content from Saturday Night Live, the company's loss was ultimately greater than what they'd achieved by fighting giants like Netflix and Amazon Studios.

"Video content from Yahoo as well as our partners has been transitioned from Yahoo Screen to our Digital Magazine properties so users can discover complementary content in one place," said a rep for the company in a press release after announcing their streaming service was being shut down.

As The AV Club reports, even though the Community season on Yahoo! was critically successful, last year the company pointed fingers at the show for not bringing in enough advertiser support, and it's been discussed that its massive money loss was what ultimately brought the service down.

Still, it's understandable, considering Yahoo! went all in too fast. Their first major project was an already established show that cost millions to make, yet it was a very niche market, as Community was never the most popular show ratings-wise, gathering more of a cult, smaller following.

While it can be argued that Netflix took a similarly strong step when releasing House of Cards, as the project included a few major players such as Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright and David Fincher, who demanded higher salaries, it's known that the streaming giant turned production company goes through extensive research before putting out a new show, which Yahoo! doesn't seem to have done.