The past few weeks have been a marathon of video content and live streaming companies emerging. Now, new streaming video serviced, Vessel, founded by former Hulu CEO, Jason Kilar, is ready for primetime with a $2.99 a month offering as well as a free offering.
While a lot of the initial content is made up of lifestyle and comedy programming, the company has locked in deals with multiple record labels to provide exclusive music through its paid tier; including Warner Nashville debuting Blake Shelton’s latest music video and Warner Bros. Records releasing a new video for Big Data’s “Dangerous.”
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Aside from more mainstream acts, the company will also act as a venue to partner up with less known, emerging creators such as popular cover band, Boyce Avenue. And it’s not just music, partners like Buzzfeed, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, TED and notable Youtube Stars like Glozell are all highly visible on Day 1 of Vessel’s public launch.
To date, they have 170 content partners, 135 who have joined since a 60-day beta debuted in January.
Sounds weirdly similar to our little friends (cough cough YouTube), however—and this is the key point—the revenue shares of ad revenue are 70% while YT is at 55%.
So it seems as though Vessel is taking the beauty of YouTube, making the content more exclusive, providing more benefits for the creators and making a more positive experience for audiences.
In this new revolution of TV, premium video, or whatever you want to call it, the value of the creators is often greater than the value of the platform alone.
Not only do new platforms have to build technology to scale, they also need to make themselves attractive for creators with scale to want to distribute their content there.
Whether through favorable rev shares, strong community development, creative control or long-term monetization opportunities, embracing the #CreatedWith Economy means understanding that the success of your content platform is going to be based on creating an environment that’s favorable to creators.
In the year to come, expect to see more and more content providers and distribution platforms build out deeper relationships with creators and the emerging talent agencies that represent them in order to build trust, and ultimately become the favored platform of choice.
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New York City-based BRaVe Ventures —founded by David Beck, Jesse Redniss and Gary Vaynerchuck—works across the entertainment and technology ecosystems to advise, accelerate, invest and incubate business opportunities. Redniss is a member of the PromaxBDA Board of Directors. Follow BRaVe on Twitter @WeAreBRaVe.
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