Former Hulu execs Jason Kilar and Richard Tom have just launched their latest venture, Vessel, a premium video subscription service. The service, which is costs $3 a month, aims to help consumers more easily discover high-quality content that can normally be lost on YouTube, while also helping artists make more money.
Vessel is being offered first in beta to people, who previously registered to try the service, on a first-come, first-served basis, or you can try signing up here.
The video service is probably not for everyone, but could appeal to a subset of die-hard YouTube fans.
Vessel is claiming to have content from some of the top YouTube creators, up to 72 hours before YouTube has it. Categories include everything from music, food and travel; beauty, science and vlogging; gaming, pranks and sports; comedy, ideas and pop culture. The service was designed with mobile in mind, so it works on iPhones and iPads, and on the Web. It is also working on apps for Android, connected TVs and gaming consoles.
“Our vision is to make Vessel accessible anywhere fans have an internet-connected screen,” said Kilar, in a blog post this morning.
Vessel is launching with 120,000 videos, and it is claiming to offer early access to music videos by artists and sports videos from partners, like ESPN. Vessel will have a free tier, but obviously, if you don’t want to pay you can also wait 72 hours to see the videos through regular channels.
For artists, Vessel is about the money.
Creators will be paid to upload their content on Vessel by being offered premium ad rates. Vessel estimates that a creator takes home only about $2.20 per thousand views, according to BusinessInsider, but on Vessel, creators will potentially receive around $50 per thousand views. Vessel artists are paid through a combination of ad revenue and subscription revenues (60 percent of all subscription revenue is pooled, and creators are given a percentage based on the number of minutes their content is watched each month).
Users should note that even while they are paying for the service that doesn’t mean it will be ad free. Pre-roll ads won’t last longer than five seconds, and there will be something called “motion posters” in your feed, which are interactive objects.
In December, some of the details on Vessel’s plans became available when it started recruiting content creators. Vessel is backed by several investors, including Benchmark, Greylock and Bezos Expeditions, the venture capital arm of Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos.
Both Kilar and Tom have spent time in Seattle. Kilar worked at Amazon for almost a decade in a variety of positions, writing the first business plan for Amazon’s move into online video, and reporting to Bezos as a senior vice president with the company. Tom worked for years at Microsoft in a variety of development and management roles
Vessel had previously operated under the code name The Fremont Project, a name that paid homage to Seattle’s quirky neighborhood that’s home to Tableau, Impinj, Adobe, GeekWire and Tom’s favorite sandwich shop, Paseo.
