Former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar's Vessel opens to public for $2.99/month, 12 months free if you sign up within 72 hours
Former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar's Vessel Launches To The Public — Vessel, the new online video subscription service built by some of the early team at Hulu, is launching to the public today.
Context & Ripple Effects
Vessel's public opening is the payoff of a deliberate two-step: Jason Kilar and his early Hulu team spent late 2014 running a Creator Preview that dangled up-to-$50 CPM payouts to pull YouTube stars into an exclusive early-video window, then spent early 2015 converting those signings into a limited beta with more stars on board. Today's launch turns that creator supply into a consumer product at $2.99/month — with a 72-hour window for a full free year designed to convert beta curiosity into a locked-in subscriber base before momentum fades.
The bet is that a cheap subscription layered on top of free video can fund itself through creator economics rather than content licensing — the model Hulu proved Kilar could run, now aimed directly at YouTube's talent pipeline.
First-order effects
- The YouTube stars signed during Creator Preview and the January beta finally have a paying audience for their early-window videos, testing whether their fanbases will follow them off-platform at $2.99/month.
- Consumers who sign up within 72 hours get 12 months free, letting Vessel buy its first cohort of subscribers while spending almost nothing on acquisition.
Second-order effects
- A strong launch validates the model for investors — the corpus shows Vessel quickly raising a $57.5M Series B led by IVP just weeks after this launch — giving it runway to keep poaching talent with guaranteed CPMs YouTube doesn't match.
- YouTube faces pressure to answer with its own subscription product for creators, which is exactly where things move next: by 2016 Vessel is forced to go ad-free for paying subscribers in response to YouTube Red, showing the incumbent's counter-move set the terms of competition.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, video platforms compete on creator payout structures — early-access windows, revenue guarantees, ad-free tiers — rather than on distribution alone, since distribution is already solved by free incumbents.
- The hybrid of ads plus subscription becomes the default pricing structure for new video services, with each player adjusting the mix reactively against the others' moves.
The trend: Video startups are attacking YouTube not with better distribution but with better creator economics, forcing the incumbent into subscription responses that redefine how online video is monetized.