For years we in the alternative media have struggled against censorship from the platforms we broadcast on.
Now YouTube, Facebook and Google are all targeting our views as “extremist” or “fake news”.
Up until now these platforms would just delete your account. This resulted in us creating multiple accounts to still disseminate our views.
As they realized this was a waste of time, their next move was to quietly “hide” our content and squeeze off the meager income that is derived from advertising shares.
Now the advertisers themselves are organizing to choke off any sort of monetary compensation for their ads appearing on our work.
I predicted this years ago…
In 2011 we had a massive increase in traffic to our YouTube channel. We started climbing the ranks to become the #12 channel in Canada and we’re starting to bring in about $300 per month for advertising.
I was extremely excited that this would help buy the equipment we needed to start making some semi-professional productions.
It was all looking good, so I decided to put the equipment on my credit card and pay it off with the YouTube money.
No sooner had the equipment arrived on my doorstep, I noticed our ad revenue had a big a drop. They had demonetized one of the bigger videos due to copyright strikes. This wasn’t a case of us using copyrighted material, it was that someone had obtained a copyright on public domain content. We had used an audio clip from Bill Cooper and someone was claiming they owned it.
So this ended up delaying a lot of plans we had. We had great equipment but no revenue coming in.
This pattern repeated for the next 3 years. I even went as far as licensing 100% of the content with written consent, only to have YouTube pull the ads off the videos again and again.
By 2014 we had started building an alternative platform to host our videos without the fear of YouTube removing our content without any notice.
Conspiracy Channel is born…
After a lot of research and testing I found that I could start a Roku channel using most of the the equipment we already had. I decided it was worth it to have a backup system and maybe even a few new viewers.
In that first year we surged to 50,000 installs and a tonne of daily visitors.
Since that time we have consistently grown by 50,000 installs per year and as of launching this website we have now crossed 200,000 installs!
We started reaching out to the other content producers out there and offered them space on our system.
In 2015 we started offering a +Plus membership to help support the growth of the system. In 2016 we upgraded our Roku app to the latest technology and launched a new FireTV app with subscriptions.
Now 2017 is here and we are making our biggest changes ever…
New Name, New Platform…
For over a year we have been planning to expand our platform to allow more content creators to join us in fighting back against YouTube.
On June 1st, 2017 we will be publishing our latest update to our Roku app. This is probably the biggest update we’ve ever done. Our entire backend system was re-engineered to have more content while delivering it faster. In current test we are seeing about a 75% decrease in load times. Wow!
The new Roku app has some great new features as well:
- You can create a free account or login directly with the app
- A new Live TV & Radio section (my favorite addition)
- Redesigned user interface that makes it easier to browse content
- New “Watch Later” cue and recommendation engine
- Streamlined purchases for Rentals and +Plus subscriptions
A Note for FireTV users:
At some point we will be moving our FireTV app over to the new system as well. Unfortunately, we do not have an Android coder to help out so we may need to pay someone to build it. Until we get this figured out, the Fire TV app will remain known as “Conspiracy Channel” and we will be launching a secondary app for FreeJack TV that contains our Free content with advertising.
Final thoughts….
We are now in the finally stretches of development and hope to have the Roku app and Web portal available on June 1st, 2017. Once we have the bugs worked out, we will be adding new features almost monthly.
One cool feature that I have been working on will allow us to notify you of major events (war, apocalyptic scenario, world news, etc) while watching content on our system. We hope to have it out this fall, but it will depend on how the rest of the development goes.
Turn On. Boot Up. Jack In.
The Revolution will be televised…