I’ve been busy degoogling and thinking of replacing YouTube with these two streaming services. You can get them bundled for $50/yr. Anyone have experience with them, and are they worth it? Thank you!
I like Nebula by itself. I like it and find enough content there to make it worth it. There is some long form content there that wouldn’t be released on YouTube.
I think with promo codes, that a lot of YouTubers have, you can get the e bundled cost down to $15 per year.
Overall I’d say for that price they’re a great choice.
I subscribe, but I can’t figure out the Nebula business model. I’d love to know if there are any Nebula content creators here who want to share their experiences. Curiosity Stream seems to mainly license content so their model seems straight forward enough.
When I first signed up for it Nebula was a $5/year addon to curiosity stream which wouldn’t even pay for the bandwidth I used in year one. That is not much money to spread around to creators. I assumed this was a short-lived audience grab, but it’s continued (with some variation) for years now. Meanwhile creators are making a lot of Nebula exclusives for what seems like a very small pool of money. As someone who’s been in tech for a long time this seems like a value pump to sell, but that only makes sense if the creators (or least the biggest ones) have some form of equity… if it makes sense at all in the current market.
They might have covered it a bit in this video
This kinda showcases a weakness of Nebula - that is a Nebula video, but sharing the Youtube version is easier. Unless I don’t understand Nebula’s sharing feature?
That said my watching has gradually been shifting from Youtube to Nebula.
Edit: Oh right, the Nebula link. https://nebula.tv/videos/wendover-how-a-small-group-of-creators-built-a-150-million-business/
I don’t think Nebula is meant for “Broadcast yourself” YT where everyone and their mom can create content and get found. I think it’s meant for creators with established audiences.
Nebula is owned by creators of content, maybe not all of them, but definitely at begining.
I signed up about a year ago to watch historical videos. I’ve signed on maybe once a month, maybe less. It’s nice the videos don’t have ads. I like the idea of it. Just need to carve out time to watch the hour long vids - could save for later, but I’m bad about follow up on media.
I dont have any interest in the curiousitystream content, but I enjoy supporting my favorite science and engineering youtubers on Nebula, which is owned by creators. There’s a few unique videos on Nebula that you can’t get on YouTube, but I mainly just subscribe as a more direct way of paying my favorite youtubers without any middlemen.
It’s been fine for me. I’ve watched a handful of documentaries/series on curiosity stream and I watch like, 2 creators on nebula but I’ve got it for $19.99 a year so I don’t think about the cost
Curiositystream seemed like a dump for B-documentaries and Nebula… while it has many cool creators, I don’t think it scales well. Neither the interface nor the business model seems to work for a larger amount of creators and it gets boring quick. Also the Apple TV app keeps bugging out for me, even years later, they just don’t seem to care much about it. I think it should cost more and they should invest more into a better experience.
I just use Nebula to watch Jet Lag. I haven’t watched anything else on it
I know 4 people who have a nebula subscription, literally everyone has the same reason.
Jet Lag is so good. I’m happy to support the show
I like them both. They are also dirt cheap, so you can hardly go wrong with it.
If the pirpose is degoogling try using newpipe or libretube
That’d still expose you to Google, just using a FOSS client rather than Google’s proprietary clients. It’s better but Google still has all the power here.
They suck, quite badly. There’s very little interesting content and all of it is just reuploads of YouTube with very few exceptions.
I’d love a real alternative for YouTube but I’m not going to get excited about trading one closed platform walled garden run by a corporation that ostensibly only cares about money for another.
I use both YT and Nebula. Nebula is for when you know what you want to watch, like those creators you already know from YT, and you follow them on Nebula to get the ad-free version. YT is for when I don’t know what I want, just mindlessly scroll until something catches my attention.
The YT algorithm doesn’t always work, but it’s still likely the most effective way to discover new content to my taste so far. And when it doesn’t work, all I see is just crap.
So, why would someone say Nebula is less interesting than YT? Nebula may not be your cup of tea, but it’s always someone’s cup of tea. Meanwhile there are tons of trash on YT.
My suggestion is to use both and for the right purpose.
Read my comment more carefully. There’s very little interesting content doesn’t mean that there is no interesting content or that there isn’t interesting content on there. There is content on there that is interesting. There is just very little of it for the money compared to paying for any other streaming service. And for a service that claims to be a documentary streaming service, most of the videos on there that I saw are only a few minutes long. Not what I’d class as documentaries.
If you want to support creators that you like then just subscribe to their Patreon or use their Kofi link or something like that.
If you want to remove ads then get an adblocker or pay for YouTube premium.
I don’t use it yet but the content from the creators who take part in Nebula that I see on YT would be reason enough to drop 15-20$/year on it.
What makes you say that’s not interesting content?
I didn’t say there isn’t any interesting content on there, just that there’s very little of it. And almost all of the interesting content I can get for free elsewhere, and I would rather support creators I like by donating to them directly rather than letting them have some small percentage of money while they’re tied to a specific platform.
That’s the thing, you’re not getting it for free elsewhere. On YouTube/Google, you’re paying through different means. If you don’t think that price is justified, Nebula could be a much cheaper alternative.
The amount of content that’s there isn’t sufficient to completely stop using YouTube, and it never will be. Unless you only ever go on YouTube to watch creators who also post on Nebula, it’s a waste of money, IMO. Just get an ad blocker and continue to use YouTube
Yes, there’s little interesting content there. But I think if you get a code for the extra-cheap bundle that’s less than $20/year, it can be worth it.
I subscribed for a few months but I kept getting the feeling that it is a mostly white/male space with little effort to branch out from that. I like most of the creators on there, and there are some great BIPOC creators if you search for them, but the “front page” and all of their advertising appears to be almost exclusively white dudes talking science/history. Feels a little icky
deleted by creator
They are walled gardens, even more walled then youtube. You can only view the content if you pay a fee.
On that alone I would rather use youtube.
I support peer tube, odysee, and rumble (though rumble is just trying to be another youtube) because they are not walled gardens.
– For the people downvoting –
Have you heard of the dark web? It’s the part of the internet that isn’t publicly accessible, not indexed. The amount of human creative spirit that is built, and lost, to languish behind a paywall is a unforgivable sin against future generations.
All systems eventually die, including video systems, the pay wall prevents archival (wayback machine, internet archive, isn’t going to be able to preserve a dark web site)
Imagine if the library of congress only get 1-3% of the books ever created… the gap in our cultural knowledge and understanding would be massive.
How should the creators be compensated? This isn’t being made by some large media conglomerate and they are creating content that has been found to not be able to be funded by advertising.
Thats a good question. If these closed gardens provided a copy to internet archive (to be unlocked in the future, or in the event of bankruptcy) I think I wouldn’t have any objections.
There are many monetization models in the world, this one is problematic for the reasons I brought up earlier.
If we take a note from literature publishing, libraries can lend out a copy, and the library of congress gets one (two?) free copies of every book. Maybe the same could be done with digital content.
The pateron model where subscribers get early content a few days, weeks, or month ahead of time is another option.
I don’t know the best, or perfect solution, but making ephemeral work that disappears in a few years (the ultimate dark age of bit rot) worries me.
If these closed gardens provided a copy to internet archive (to be unlocked in the future, or in the event of bankruptcy) I think I wouldn’t have any objections.
As far as I’m aware, Nebula / Curiosity Stream doesn’t have any exclusivity agreements with creators… they’re free to post their videos elsewhere, too. Why is it Nebula’s responsibility - or even their right - to archive creators’ content? Shouldn’t the creators be the ones to decide how and where their content is distributed?
For Nebula, it depends.
If the creator made the work on their own dime, then it can be released anywhere.
However, Nebula will give creators money to make content that creators could not self fund. In those cases, these videos could either be Nebula exclusive or Nebula first videos.
That’s good info - I wasn’t aware of that being a thing. Does that exclusivity agreement survive the hypothetical dissolution of Nebula? If not, the creators would be free to distribute it as they saw fit in the situation you propose where Nebula goes out of business and archival is needed.
I don’t know and that hasn’t been made public. However, since Nebula is owned by the creators, I can’t imagine a scenario where the creators give up their copyright if the business fails.
I think a major part of the problem is that Internet videos haven’t seemed to reach a point where it is viable to purchase them. Libraries were able to exist because they were protected to be able to lend purchased books due to first sale doctrine. We don’t have an equivalent to this for Internet videos as the market isn’t there.
There seems to be a floor of around a dollar where a digital good will be sold in a marketplace where the good can be used outside of that marketplace. No one is going to sell a digital good for a cent or a fraction of a cent, so there isn’t the ability for a library to buy a video for archival purposes.
I don’t know how that gets fixed.
Just a small note here. The LOC does not have a copy of every book published. https://www.loc.gov/about/frequently-asked-questions/#every_book
Have you heard of the dark web? It’s the part of the internet that isn’t publicly accessible, not indexed.
No, that’s the deep web.
Data on the internet can, and often will, get lost, paywall or not. And I don’t see the issue in paying creators, who often also have to put a lot of money into making their videos. Seems preferable to having to rely on sponsorships and ad revenues.
Oh, good point! I didn’t know the distinction! thank you
Deep web and dark web are synonyms, really.
I agree with you, I miss comments from random people, even on youtube, most of the time it os some useful insight.
That was the worst part of having some subscription, no coments.
This is consequence of walked garden. Creators should be compensated, but this model is not for me.
