with the writer's guild on strike, some are expecting to see a deluge of reality shows like we did in 2007. but i think there's a new game in town for streaming services to pounce on: youtubers.
watch my new video and leave a comment if you have your own thoughts!
so after posting this video yesterday i got a comment saying that Nebula is sponsored by Discovery Channel, which i did not think was true and decided to look up. and it isn't true! Nebula is not sponsored by Discovery Channel as far as i can tell. HOWEVER, researching the subject led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, starting with this article from 2021.
let me cherry-pick three quotes for you here:
Creator-owned streaming service Nebula, which bills itself as a “thoughtful expansion pack for YouTube,” has received its first investment. Longtime content partner Curiosity Stream has seeded an undisclosed amount of money in the platform.
Curiosity Stream, meanwhile, is a publicly traded, documentary-focused streaming service on NASDAQ (under the ticker CURI) from Discovery Channel founder John S. Hendricks. Its market cap is currently just north of $585 million.
Curiosity Stream sponsors content from select Nebula creators
(emphasis mine)
so basically-- creators who reach a certain threshold of saturation/professionalism/reliability on Youtube might get an offer from Nebula to create content for their platform. then Nebula creators who reach a certain threshold of saturation/professionalism/reliability might get an offer from Curiosity Stream to create content for their platform. this is a pretty clear instance of the "professionalization pipeline" i theorized about in the above video, and it's already been kind of real in a very limited sense for at least three years.
now, i want to be clear about some things here. first of all, i do not believe this is inherently a bad thing! i think we need a professionalization pipeline for online video producers if this gig is to ever resolve into a sustainable career. and SO FAR, Nebula/Curiosity Stream have operated with clearly defined principles and priorities beyond simple economic growth. the above article even points out that creators on Nebula are treated as shareholders, and in the event of an acquisition they'd take 50% of the profits. (though if i may don my cynic's cap, the phrasing "treated as" makes me wonder if said creators are actually shareholders, and if they would still maintain a controlling interest in the company after getting paid for the acquisition)
secondly, as far as i can tell, John Hendricks no longer has any connection to Discovery. he stepped down from the board of directors at Discovery in 2014, though i have no doubt he still owns stock in the company. so no, neither Nebula nor Curiosity Stream is "sponsored by" Discovery Channel. furthermore, Curiosity Stream as Nebula's bigger brother seems committed to an ad-free subscription-based model, which fundamentally limits some of the growth potential i outlined in my video.
DOUBLE HOWEVER. i want to highlight this section from the LA Times article linked above re: Hendricks stepping down from Discovery:
Hendricks stepped down as CEO of Discovery in 2004. Since then the Discovery networks have added more commercial fare in the form of reality shows
While there have been criticisms about Discovery pursuing more commercial fare at the expense of educational programming, Hendricks defended the company’s broadening of its appeal in his autobiography “A Curious Discovery,” published last year.
I could not disagree more,” Hendricks wrote. “Nor will I ever apologize for having built Discovery on good business principles.” In his letter to the board, Hendricks praised [David] Zaslav for being a “careful steward of the Discovery brand.
(emphasis, once again, mine)
uh oh, David Zaslav jumpscare! if you don't recognize his name, you should: Zaslav is one of the architects behind the disastrous Warner/Discovery merger, who pushed for an endless variety of IP to be removed from various streaming services to avoid paying residuals to the artists who created them. this is a huge talking point amid the WGA strike, and while i don't want to put too much weight on comments made to press in 2014 i don't think it's unfair to raise an eyebrow or two at this connection.
so let's wrap this up by remembering that when Discovery Channel first started, they funded high-quality educational content on a variety of subjects, gained a ton of notoriety and good will among audiences (growing up, Discovery was our go-to fallback for when nothing else was on). then slowly, over time, they shifted their priorities towards low-cost, high-volume reality shows. i cannot emphasize enough that Discovery becoming the purveyor of absolute trash it is today was unthinkable twenty years ago.
now we have Curiosity Stream, positioned similarly as a principled platform dedicated to education without rampant commercialization. their connection to Nebula makes a lot of sense in that respect, as several generations of aspiring educators and documentarians have had nowhere else to turn to peddle their wares but Youtube for years. downplay the average quality of Youtube content all you like, the fact is a huge percentage of the folks there would've been making PBS documentaries forty years ago. a commitment to giving the best of those creators the opportunity to actually make something with a (bigger than they're used to) budget could prove to be very fruitful! but how long can we really rely on those priorities when Hendricks himself praised Zaslav for the commercialization of Discovery? there is simply no getting around the fact that Curiosity Stream is a publicly traded company, and if we've learned anything over the last ten years it should be that there are no founding principles so pure they can't be openly decimated for profit in an acquisition or merger.
everything i theorized about in the video depends on a whole host of factors. i do not think the corporate capture of Youtube-likes is inevitable, nor even especially likely to succeed. but here already we have the first inklings of an attempt at this strategy, with the satellite connections between Hendricks and the broader corporate telecom industry, and the emerging pathway to professionalization for creators from Youtube to Nebula to Curiosity Stream. will it manifest into a business model comparable in savings to the reality show boom of the mid 2000s? i don't know. right now it seems unlikely. but all it takes is one company to kind of get it right once for every other streamer to take notice. capitalists are senseless herd animals, and they've never met a scam or a failure too obvious not to invest in if it helped even a single competitor turn a profit. so far i don't think Nebula/Curiosity Stream have made that kind of splash in the streaming world, but the market is rapidly changing and studios are desperate to make their debt vehicles streaming services profitable, either literally or speculatively.
anyway, i want to end by addressing some of the doom & gloom i've gotten in the comments saying i'm right and everything's going to get worse and etc etc etc. cut it out! this is not "the sky is falling." the success of a strategy like this depends on the obfuscation of the capitalist's true goals in the eyes of the consumer. the more people have clear eyes about this, the less likely the strategy is to succeed. remember how effective it was bullying companies & celebrities over NFTs and cryptocurrency? you can't be ready to do that when the time comes if you haven't put some thought into it first. so pay attention not just to what they say but what they do, and don't be afraid to talk about this (respectfully!) with other people in your life, especially those who might not be inclined to agree with you at the moment. because if enough people express the same skepticism, more people will see it and feel it and agree, and that's how it spreads. not all at once, not overnight, but cumulatively over years. ten years ago unions were dead in America and "socialism" was a four letter word. look where we are today! look how fast these things can change! it may not have resulted in material policy gains yet, but such is the nature of the oncoming wave: you can't see it until it's already arrived. this is a long game, and we have to be in it for as long a haul as the capitalists are.
in short: tell a lass capitalism's bad, she'll be a comrade for a day; teach a lass how to see & communicate capital's shortfalls in advance, she'll be a comrade for life, and sooner or later so will all her friends, and their friends, and on, and on, until suddenly "socialism" starts looking like the liberal center it should be
