Vessel now open to anyone, offers free and paid version

Vessel is now open to anyone, offering both a free and a paid service. And, if you sign up to the service in the next three days you’ll get the first year of subscription for free.

The startup has attracted a considerable amount of attention and high-profile partnerships, in its quest to allow content creators to increase the revenues generated by their videos in the first few days of their availability. 

Vessel's paid service will offer exclusive access to videos between 72 hours and a week before their official release on other channels. The company believes that people will be willing to pay for access in exchange fore being the first to see them on the web. 

The paid version of the service costs just $2.99 per month and will offer user the aforementioned “early access”, the free version will just be a curated version of videos available on the site that are not on pre-release and other video content available online. The site already offers hundreds of “channels” including those of popular Vloggers and YouTubers, but also content by high-profile organisations such as Time, BuzFeed, TED and The Verge.

From a music perspective Vessel has already struck a deal with Universal Music and the label will experiment with the service over the coming months, hopefully with artists/releases that are big enough to offer some idea as to how the service can scale (a new Nicki Minaj or Ariana Grande video would be perfect).

Will users bite? That will be down to what kind of content the site can offer. YouTube's dominance of the video space is safe, for now.

(Andrea Leonelli)