Hey, aspiring film makers! Gumroad, the crazy simple platform for selling digital goods, is rolling out a pretty big new feature for you this morning: on-demand video streaming. You upload your video, name a price, and they’ll handle all the legwork involved with accepting payments and streaming the content.
This move pins Gumroad head-to-head with some pretty huge contenders, placing them squarely in a space amongst the likes of Amazon and iTunes.
Gumroad’s new streaming option works much like everything else on Gumroad has to date: content creators upload their stuff, pick a price (or let the buyer choose how much they want to pay), and get a super simple purchasing page (and an embeddable purchasing widget) in return. Once buyers punch in their details and finalize the sale, they’re emailed a unique link to their download — or in this case, their stream.
Once buyers click through the link, they’re presented with a video player that should play friendly with just about web-capable device you throw at it, be it a full-blown laptop or a Flash-less phone. The player supports video resolutions up to 1080p, and content creators can choose to host the player on either Gumroad.com or, with a few lines of HTML dropped in place, on their own domain.
So, how much will it cost you? Gumroad has always had a relatively small transaction fee, and they’re maintaining that same fee structure here: whatever you want to sell your digital content for, they’ll take 5% + 25¢. (Unless you’re not charging anything, in which case there’s no fee whatsoever.)
Compare that to the other guys in the space. iTunes? Apple takes 30%. Amazon? Again, 30%. VHX, a nascent competitor in the indie movie streaming space, has yet to reveal the percentage they’ll take when they officially launch (but I’m told it’s around 15%.)
At a selling price of $1, Gumroad’s take and Apple’s take are the same: 30 cents. At $10, Apple’s take is $3, while Gumroad’s is 0.75, with $9.25 going to the content creator. The catch, of course, is that gettin’ the word out about your content is on you — there’s no massively popular, all encompassing storefront here to help you push it.
Of course, video creators can still use Gumroad to offer their schtuff as a traditional download, rather than a stream. For the time being, at least, it’s gotta be one or the other — that is, you can’t offer the folks who buy a stream of your video an offline download for later, a la Louis CK, without a separate transaction.
Gumroad was a one-man company when it launched back in February of 2012, initially built entirely by then 19-year-old ex-Pinterest/Turntable designer Sahil Lavingia. They’ve since raised around $8.1M, with the team having just hired its 13th employee.
[Disclosure: CrunchFund, the venture firm lead by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, is an investor in Gumroad. While noone at Crunchfund has ever so much as casually mentioned Gumroad to me, I like to be clear about this stuff.]
