We have seen many large companies fail who relied solely on ads: Veoh, Stage6, even Google video failed to make money from ads!
The problem with ads is the cpm is always so low on such content and the bandwidth so high, it was this problem which led me to develop the general concept for my own http://www.documentary-film.net which was always on the brink of closure until I implemented this concept.
It worked so well that sales increased over 90% and I was able to afford a proper CDN (highwinds) to deliver the content.
After this I didn't think more about it until Andrew Warner @ Mixergy mentioned about charging for his content and I told him that introducing a pay wall (as he planed) would result in viewings going to zero, instead I told him to develop something like I had with doc-film-net.
Of course his response was, where's the plug in for that?
That's when I had the aha moment and built it for him and anyone else who is in the same boat. There's a ton of tech involved to achieve this feature and its way out of depth for the average content producer.
