I'm very interested in this space. I had an idea about 3 years ago for what appears to basically be Nebula (which I just found today based on another comment in

I'm very interested in this space. I had an idea about 3 years ago for what appears to basically be Nebula (which I just found today based on another comment in this thread). My idea was basically: * Creators are curated and are seeded from existing Youtube channels. Curation happens on the creator level where illegal content means removal of the channel. * No advertising so latitude for monetization of brand-unfriendly content. * User pay a monthly subscription fee. * Money is divided amongst creators based on watch time. Some ideas I had that I don't see represented: * Users have the opportunity to pay more per month and can elect to spend this money in a discretionary way, like a "tip". This isn't shared based on watch time but by direct action from the user towards creators they want to show appreciation above and beyond. * Creators can elect some of their content as "free" content, e.g. introductory videos, videos older than 3 months, etc. in order to attract and grow an audience. This free content does not contribute to their "watch-time" that comprises their share of subscription revenue but it can attract discretionary tips. A couple of points: * Anyone who scoffs at the idea of the discretionary monthly "tip" idea has not watched the flood of donations to Twitch streamers. However, some kind of feedback would be required in a similar way to TTS shoutouts - I'm not sure on this. We tend to focus on the majority who say "I would never pay $Y for anything!" while ignoring the whales that would happily pay $Y * 100 given the right incentives. If you've worked in free-to-play games then you know the revenue potential of whales. If you remove the ceiling of what people can pay, some people will pay above your wildest expectations just because they can. * I worked in video distribution and I was closely involved in managing costs. Most people cannot believe the costs involved in delivering video. Linus mentioned terabytes of data but that is the tip of the iceberg for popular content. Costs can ramp up to $100k/month for even modest audience sizes when storage and delivery are considered. That doesn't include server costs to run the multiple back-end and front-end services needed, nor the salaries of engineers and devops to keep it up. I was unable to find a way to make the $$ work without serious up-front investment. This isn't a space you can bootstrap on free tiers of cloud services. Ultimately the real "whales" are businesses. I don't believe any subscriber funded effort can ever attract the kind of spend that massive advertising budgets can leverage. That means that platforms funded by advertising will always have a war-chest to snipe the best content creators. Think how Mix payed for Ninja and Shroud. Even if a content creator gets popular on one of these subscriber-supported platforms there will always be an advertising platform ready with cash-in-hand to steal them away. Despite some pessimism, I am actually very bullish on this idea and I truly hope the idea succeeds!