Former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and CTO Richard Tom are back to the video business with an intriguing property called Vessel. This service aims to offer early access to popular web video stars through windowing, showing their content to subscribers several days before the clips hit YouTube and other rival platforms. Thanks to affiliations with companies like Warner Music Group and promises of more money for content creators, news of the video upstart’s plans has generated lots of buzz.
The Guardian has more detail about Vessel, which is slated to launch in early 2015. Much like Hulu, it will have a free tier and a paid tier costing $2.99 a month. The paid tier will receive the advanced viewing, while the free tier access comes at least 72 hours later. The owners of the videos can opt to extend that exclusivity period. So far, Vessel has attracted three multi-channel networks from YouTube as well as a handful of popular individuals of YouTube fame.
The intriguing element for the streaming music industry is that Vessel is working with Warner Music Group. Artists from the label will be able to show their videos on Vessel before releasing them to the Internet at large. Vevo is a partner as well, which could bring video from other labels into the fold.
It’s early enough in Vessel’s existance that we can’t make an accurate prediction about what role it might play in challenging YouTube’s dominance for music videos. Windowing has been a topic of interest for many leaders in the music space; Jon Maples and Mark Mulligan have touched on it here already. The exclusivity angle will certainly have an appeal for creatives wanting to maintain the value of their work, but it will be an uphill battle for the new service to match the vast size of YouTube’s audience. We’ll be keeping an eye on Vessel once it launches.