Subbable and the Future of Internet TV

Have you subscribed on Subbable yet?  I have.  I have $1 banked for Crash Course and $1 for CGP Grey.  For those of you don't know, Subbable is a site that allows you pay for "subscriptions" to free Youtube channels.  You may be wondering what the point is?  Why would I pay for something that is free?  The description I gave is a bit over simplified.  Although I love over simplified descriptions, I'm going to go deeper into this one.

Subbable is an attempt by "the brothers Green" to try to make some of the awesome Youtube channels financially self-sustaining.  The idea is if the content is of high enough quality, people will want to pay for it.  As long as enough people pay a small amount of money, these projects might bank enough money to become self-sustaining.  Subbable tries to be a bit like Kickstarter by allowing content creators to set goals and give rewards at certain milestones.  The goal is to allow "alternative" media to find an "alternative" funding source to prevent the degradation of quality in favor for bland mass media.

The whole idea is advertising-based income values the number of views, not the quality of the video.  In a perfect world, the number of views should correlate with the quality of the video, but sadly, it does not.  This can be proved by a number of crazy facts:

1) The Kardashians have multiple hit shows
2) John and Kate Plus Eight was on "The Learning Channel"
3)

This Kickstarter-like setup allows people to directly support the content creators that they feel create the content you most want to see more content from.  As more and more creators get onto Subbable, you can take a budget of lets say, $5/month and split it among those creators.  This style allows those frustrated with the current content offering to put their money where their mouth is.  Eventually, there are more people who like the poor quality content, so Subbable could degrade like regular TV did.

Another problem with Subbable is that it doesn't tackle the distribution problem that really needs to happen to take on Big Media.  Don't get me wrong, Subbable is a great (and needed) step towards that, but most people who watch Crash Course and CGP Grey watch those shows on their computers.  I'm one of the few that actually watches Youtube shows on my TV.  Watching Youtube on a TV is definitely bleeding edge right now.  It is not ready for prime time.  To me, it comes down to two things that still need to happen: better distribution and more (longer) content.  I will talk about those items in future blog posts.