Online Video at a Crossroads: Notes from 25 Years in the Trenches
I started offering free documentaries online in 2001, years before YouTube existed — free DivX downloads on an HTML site called DocMovies.com, built by hand because there was no other way to do it back then.
Ten years later, in 2011, I moved to pay-per-view through PayPal, streaming at 240p through a mechanism I built on top of Joomla, a content management system that was popular at the time. I was still a filmmaker then; this was a side hobby, a way to get a documentary in front of the handful of people who actually wanted to see it, because documentaries are considered “dead” three years after they’re out (I wrote about this phenomenon in another article — Films are Not Vegetables, Stop Looking for Fresh Ones).
In 2017 I built my first real VOD platform, the kind with an actual backend: right-holders, revenue share, accounts, payouts. That project was one of the reasons I stopped being a filmmaker and became a technology entrepreneur instead. I never went back.
In 2018, I added subscriptions. And because I came out of documentary filmmaking myself, I stayed in that lane; I never chased blockbusters or genre content, I built for documentaries, and mostly for the people who actually watch them: academic institutions, public libraries and the small, devoted population of people who really like documentary films.
For a long time, that was a fine place to be. Niche, yes, but stable.
Not anymore.
It feels like the ground is moving under a business I’ve run for twenty-five years and I want to lay out, plainly, what the evidence actually shows — because I think the story is bigger than any one platform’s struggles, mine included, and bigger than any single delivery technology. This isn’t just about streaming as a technical format. It’s about what’s happening to film online as a whole — however it reaches a viewer, purchased, rented, subscribed to, or streamed.
The evidence is coming from every direction
Start with Vimeo. For over a decade, Vimeo On Demand was the de facto standard in online video for independent creators who wanted to sell or rent their own work without building infrastructure from scratch; a huge share of the documentary and indie-film world ran through it in one form or another. On November 20, 2026, it shuts down completely. New uploads were disabled in August, new purchases and subscriptions stopped in September, and existing storefronts simply disappear when the date arrives. Vimeo’s own shutdown notice frames it as a redirection of resources; a report from filmmakers who received the closure email directly quotes the company saying “adoption has slowed in recent years.” Whatever the internal reasoning, the practical effect for thousands of small sellers is the same: press kits, festival programs, years of email signatures pointing at a storefront that, after November, points at nothing.
This isn’t an isolated retreat. It’s part of a much larger consolidation wave across online video generally. Industry forecasts for 2026 describe it outright as a “shakeout year”; even household names like AMC+, Starz, and Peacock are named as likely acquisition or mergers candidates, not because their content is bad, but because they lack the scale to survive as standalone businesses in a market where the top five platforms alone already capture nearly two-thirds of global subscription revenue out of roughly 130 companies competing for what’s left. Niche has never been a comfortable place to sit in this industry; a Bloomberg piece from years ago about WWE’s own streaming struggles put it simply: “it’s not easy being niche.” That sentence reads truer today than when it was written, and it applies whether the delivery is a subscription service, a rental storefront or a download.
And it isn’t only the small players who are unsettled. Even Netflix — the platform every other streamer has spent a decade trying to become — is behaving like a company that isn’t sure the subscription-and-scroll model is enough anymore. It has expanded aggressively into live programming: NFL games, WWE events, boxing, tennis exhibitions in Riyadh, an international soccer deal with Concacaf. Netflix’s co-CEO has been explicit that this isn’t about acquiring full sports seasons; it’s about proving that live, appointment-viewing events “drive outsized business impact” in a way that a library of on-demand titles simply can’t. A single WBC boxing broadcast out of Japan reportedly drove the largest single-day spike in new subscriptions the company has seen in that market. When the company that “won” streaming starts reaching for live sports and events to keep growth alive, that tells you something about the ceiling the on-demand model itself has hit.
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The subscriber-acquisition tactics tell the same story from a different angle. With engagement and subscriber growth plateauing, streaming services are increasingly asking the question, “how can I be more like YouTube?” Disney+ is reportedly exploring a free, ad-supported tier explicitly to compete with the low-commitment, always-available model of YouTube, Roku Channel, and Tubi — platforms that have been gaining viewer share as audiences grow more price-sensitive. And Netflix, which killed off free trials back in 2020 while it was still riding strong organic growth, has quietly brought them back in markets like Brazil and India for the first time in six years — in some cases offering the full 4K premium tier free for up to 30 days. The economics that let Netflix walk away from free trials in 2020 clearly don’t hold in 2026. This is a company grabbing for whatever headroom is left in the markets that still have any.
Where does that leave the people at the end of the tail?
Independent filmmakers were always at the far end of this chain — the smallest, least powerful link, the ones who benefited least from the boom and would logically be first to feel a contraction. That’s exactly what’s happening. A “Niche to Notice” panel at SXSW 2026 stated it about as bluntly as an industry panel ever does: the traditional path — get into a top festival, land a seven-figure acquisition deal, enjoy a global rollout — is effectively dead for 99 percent of creators. Films that would once have found a home now often end up with no distribution deal at all, or a quiet, invisible upload to an obscure VOD menu nobody visits. The panel’s own framing was that “streamers scaling back, traditional buyers pulling out, and theatrical costs soaring” have left indie filmmakers navigating a genuinely broken pipeline, one that requires a completely different survival strategy than the one that worked even five years ago.
I’ve watched this up close for twenty-five years, mostly from the documentary side, mostly working with people and institutions who never expected to get rich from this — academic libraries don’t pay much, devoted audiences are loyal but small. That was always the deal and I made peace with it. What’s different now isn’t that the niche got smaller. It’s that the infrastructure the niche depended on, is being pulled out from under it, one piece at a time, by companies many times my size who’ve concluded that “niche” isn’t a viable business at any scale short of Netflix’s.
So what is actually happening here?
I don’t have a tidy answer, and I’d be lying to you if I pretended I did — honesty is the only thing I’m actually selling, since I’m not selling anyone a platform pitch here. But I think there are really only two honest ways to read all of this.
One is that this is the end of an era — that the open, permissionless period of online video, where a filmmaker with a laptop and a PayPal account could reach an audience directly, is closing, and what replaces it will be smaller, more consolidated, and considerably less hospitable to anyone who isn’t already inside one of four or five giant ecosystems. Under this reading, Vimeo’s shutdown isn’t a data point, it’s a symptom. And the right response for people like me is to accept that the game has fundamentally changed and plan accordingly — smaller, leaner, more realistic about what “success” can mean.
The other reading is that this is one trough in a longer sine wave. The industry has been through cycles before — the initial DVD-to-streaming disruption, the mid-2010s streaming gold rush, the post-pandemic correction, and now this consolidation phase. Each time, the pendulum swings toward consolidation and scale, extracts the businesses that can’t survive the squeeze, and eventually swings back toward fragmentation and niche opportunity again, usually once the giants get complacent or a new distribution technology resets the playing field. Under this reading, what looks like collapse right now is actually clearance — the market shaking out the operators who never had sustainable unit economics, so that whoever’s left standing when it turns is standing on firmer ground.
I genuinely don’t know which of those two stories is true yet, and I’m suspicious of anyone — including platforms trying to sell you their solution — who claims they do. What I do know is that pretending it’s business as usual isn’t an option anymore. Twenty-five years in, I’d rather look this squarely in the eye than keep repeating a strategy that the numbers above suggest may no longer hold.
