Nebula Blog

Watch Stuff

June 9, 2022

Since the launch of Nebula Classes last month, the team has been hard at work on the next big update for Nebula. This week, we’re thrilled to get to share that work with you. Introducing…

Quick Actions
Watch Status
Watch History
Watch Later
Share Video

Quick Actions

You’ll find context menus sprinkled throughout Nebula (“…” buttons on website and mobile apps, or long-press on TV and mobile apps). Opening a context menu offers quick actions you can take on any given video, channel, lesson, class, or podcast episode. Some of the actions available are:

Share
Add to Watch Later
Download
Mark as Watched
Clear Watch Progress
Follow/Unfollow Channel

You can expect the contents of these menus to expand as the functionality of Nebula does, so be sure to keep an eye out for additional actions in the future.

Watch Status

Video thumbnails indicate a video’s watch status with a small blue progress bar at the bottom. Know at a glance which videos you’ve already watched, and even which ones you’ve started, but haven’t yet finished. You can also mark a video as watched to set its progress to 100%, or clear the watch progress on a video.

Watch History

Whether you’re trying to find that really interesting video you watched a couple weeks back to share with a friend, or just want to finish a video you got interrupted watching earlier, you can find them all in Watch History. Watch History can be accessed on any platform through settings. To remove a video from Watch History, simply use the context menu to clear watch progress, and the next time you load the Watch History, that video will be gone. You might be thinking that settings is a weird place to put Watch History. And you’re right; it is. Consider this a temporary living arrangement while Watch History’s proper home is under renovation.

Watch Later

See a video (or ten) that looks interesting, but don’t have time to watch right now? Now, you can finally add videos to your Watch Later list. Videos that you add to Watch Later will be shown in a rail at the top of the Featured view. After you’ve watched a video, you can leave it in Watch Later for easy reference later or remove it using the context menu.

Share Video

Have you ever watched a really interesting Nebula video, and tried to share it with somebody only to realize there’s no way to share unless you’re on the website? Us too. All content can now easily be shared through native share sheets on both iOS and Android.

We know these features have been high on a lot of your wish lists for a while now, and they’ve been at the top of ours for a while too. We’re excited to finally be able to share them with you, and look forward to hearing any feedback you might have: [email protected]

–Nick

Nebula Classes

May 3, 2022

I can’t believe I finally get to say this.

The next pillar of Nebula content, Nebula Classes, is live. Along with videos and podcasts — including our hundreds of Nebula Originals and Nebula Plus exclusive videos — you can now learn skills from your favorite creators in fully-produced classes available exclusively on Nebula.

There are many different ways to create courses online, but none of them quite fit the way we see the world. Most of them require creators to produce the classes ourselves and take on all of the capital risk, or place us alongside unvetted amateurs with no way to distinguish us as experts. Some platforms have pushed for cohort-led classes, which sounds like fun but requires a huge investment of the thing creators have the least of: time. In every case, it would mean spending our time and energy building value in someone else’s platform.

With Nebula, we already have a platform. We have half a million paying users. We have production budget for Original content. Why not do this ourselves and build a system for our needs, for our audiences, on our own terms?

Nebula Classes is the largest undertaking ever. Bigger than the original launch three years ago. Nearly a year of design, development, and production. Countless hours of human effort from across every team and dozens of creators. We’ve hired a fully-dedicated Classes production team, built out a production studio, and developed a process for working alongside creators.

It’s worth talking about that process.

Every Nebula class is written by the creator — who is then flown to NYC to shoot with our on-site Classes team — then handed off to our post-production team at Standard Studios for editing, motion graphics, audio cleanup, branding, and QA. We buy props, license clips, and generally look for ways to plus the class up. Every class is an investment in the creator, which includes paying the creator for their time, and giving them the same watch time revenue split as the rest of Nebula.

The first wave includes classes from Sam from Wendover, Thomas Frank, Sarah Feldman, Alex the LowSpecGamer, Aimee Nolte, and Philip from Volksgeist. We’ve also partnered with the team from Bright Trip to produce a series of Nebula-exclusive classes, starting with the ABCs of Architecture. We’re also introducing a guest-lecture style class called a Nebula Talk, starting with Matt from Extra Credits. New classes will be released every week, with classes in production right now from Rene Ritchie, Devin from LegalEagle, Georgia Dow, Noah from Polyphonic, Zach Highley, and a bunch I can’t talk about yet.

There are also interesting technical implications. Much of the engineering work for Classes required under-the-hood work that will result in the release of highly-requested Nebula features over the next month or so, like watch later, watch history, watch status, and sharing from our mobile apps.

This is a true leap forward for Nebula overall. We’re spending more money on exclusive and original content this year than the last two years combined, and our engineering and product teams are bigger than ever. This cost overhead needs to be accounted for in our pricing.

Creators selling their own online courses isn’t entirely novel, but the costs involved usually lead to very high pricing. By leaning into Nebula’s existing subscription model, instead of paying hundreds of dollars each for individual classes, the audience can access any of our classes whenever they want, and enjoy weekly additions of new classes, for a reasonable monthly (or annual) price.

As of today, most of our users have come in through the Curiosity Stream bundle. Those users can upgrade their accounts to include Classes access for only $5 more per month, or they can skip classes and keep their current access at no additional cost. For existing direct users, Classes access is immediate, and no price increase will be seen until January of 2023. For new folks coming in, the price goes from $5 per month ($50 per year) to $10 per month ($100 per year). For new users, visiting a creator URL to sign up will still get you a 20% ( $2 per month or $20 per year) discount. Nebula sans Classes will still be available for all new Curiosity Stream bundle users.

This is about accounting for the cost of all of this additional content, but also about setting us up for the future. For a long time we assumed that Classes would be a new tier of Nebula service. In the end, that felt wrong to us — Nebula should just be Nebula, and setting precedent of extra costs for new content categories painted a picture of a nickel-and-dime future that didn’t feel great to us. We don’t want to tie our destiny to a Nebula Pro account upsell path. Prices may change over time, but this means that Nebula is Nebula.

Nebula is all about giving creators the best home for everything they make. With Classes, one more boundary has been removed, and our creators have a whole new opportunity to inform and inspire. I’m super proud of the team — staff and creator alike — for all of the work they’ve put in to make this possible, and I can’t wait for the world to see all of the amazing stuff we’ve been working on.

-Dave

Nebula RSS Feeds

April 30, 2022

RSS fans rejoice: Nebula now has official RSS feeds for videos. If you’re already familiar with RSS, you probably already recognize the value in this. Subscribing to feeds will allow you to be notified of things like new videos from your favorite creators, new Nebula Originals, and when a new creator joins Nebula. You can even subscribe to feeds to know when new Nebula Plus videos are available. We currently have the following feeds available:

Latest Videos:
https://rss.nebula.app/video.rss

Nebula Originals:
https://rss.nebula.app/video/categories/originals.rss

New Channels:
https://rss.nebula.app/video/channels.rss

Latest Videos for a Channel:
https://rss.nebula.app/video/channels/{channel_slug}.rss

Latest Videos in a Category:
https://rss.nebula.app/video/categories/{category}.rss

Latest Plus Videos:
https://rss.nebula.app/video.rss?plus=true

Plus Videos for a Channel:
https://rss.nebula.app/video/channels/{channel_slug}.rss?plus=true

Plus Videos in a Category:
https://rss.nebula.app/video/categories/{category}.rss?plus=true

Anywhere you see curly braces (ex: {channel_slug}), it means that part of the URL can be replaced with a number of different values. For example, if you want to know when a new video is posted to the history category, you would subscribe to https://rss.nebula.app/video/categories/history.rss. We’ll include a list of category feeds at the end of this post, but know that this list may become incomplete as new categories are added in the future. For channels, the best way to find the channel slug is to navigate to the channel on web, and look at the final part of the URL. Lastly, as you may have already deduced from the feeds above, ?plus=true is an optional URL parameter that you can add to any video feed to get only Nebula Plus content from that feed.

We’d love to have a feed for My Library, but it presents unique technical challenges that we’re not ready to tackle quite yet. If you experience any issues, or have ideas for other feeds you’d like to see, please let us know at [email protected].