The next time you get bored with watching whatever's rotting your brain on your television or your iPhone, you'll have a healthier alternative: educational courses.
Don't laugh. And no, we're not talking about America's Test Kitchen or This Old House on PBS, but video courses on everything from learning Excel to making a duct-tape prom dress. The online lifelong learning company Curious.com today is launching a new service called CuriousTV that will offer a free slate of 10 channels with thousands of videos grouped into categories such as business, music, crafting, and food.
The service will be available for free 24 hours a day at Curious.com/tv, on its iOS app, and through three new distribution partners: the over-the-top settop box Roku, the consumer health site Healthline, and the hotel technology services firm Intelity. CEO Justin Kitch also hints at bigger distribution deals to come in the next few months.
The company, which is opening a studio in its Menlo Park (Calif.) headquarters, also will broadcast daily live "learning sessions" on each channel such as, say, yoga sessions, crazy science experiments, authors on book tours, or how to shoot a basketball with Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry. Not least, viewers will be able to ask teachers questions live. "It starts to make learning a form of entertainment," says Kitch.
The moves are an attempt to catapult Curious' offerings beyond smartphones and desktop computers into the biggest screen in the home, where Kitch reckons they could be a welcome alternative to, or at least a respite from, binge viewing of Game of Thrones on HBO or House of Cards on
Kitch thinks there's enough content now to interest a wide variety of people, so the key going forward is making it easier to find. The company is publishing a "TV guide" a week in advance of shows and allowing people to RSVP for courses they like and get reminders, even on the
Curious also introduced a new subscription option that essentially sets it up potentially to become the Netflix of learning. The company is offering a "Curious+" service that will provide all-you-can-eat access to all the lessons for $8.99 a month or $59.99 a year, similar to Netflix. CuriousTV will offer free streaming access to all 10 channels with those lessons, but only members can rewind the lessons. Paid members also will be able to interact with the teachers during the live events.
Kitch started out vowing not to run advertising, and he says he still won't run ads on CuriousTV, beyond house ads for its own service. But partners such as Healthline might run ads alongside the Curious offerings on their sites.
Curious still faces a lot of competition, whether it's academic-oriented sites such as Coursera, Udacity, and Khan Academy, how-to sites such as wikiHow, Instructables, and Demand Media's eHow, or random instructional videos on YouTube. But Kitch hopes Curious' focus on a subscription model for casual learning will set it apart.
Kitch won't reveal revenues, but he said his focus for now is building up the course library and audience before making revenues a priority. The company is backed with $22.5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures,
