Uscreen started as a platform for content creators to sell DVDs of their YouTube videos. Now, a decade later, it’s helping them make millions each year with fan subscriptions, customized apps, and more.

Here in 2026, the global content creator economy is a $250 billion juggernaut that grows bigger each year, powered by millions of skilled creators who share their content across major platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

But a decade ago, things were different. “Creator” hadn’t quite been cemented as a profession, and the idea of a powerful, digital content-driven industry that not only influences but challenges legacy entertainment was still a strange one.

PJ Taei knew the day would come, though. That’s why, in 2014, he and Nikita Savrov founded Uscreen. The original plan was to offer a one-stop shop for video creators who wanted to host and stream their content online and sell DVDs of said content for viewers to watch on their home TVs (it really was a different time).

“We saw a need for helping creators have an all-in-one platform for streaming their videos,” Taei explains. “Most of the need was really people who were selling DVDs, physical DVDs, and we saw an opportunity to streamline that. Everything that existed [at the time] was pretty much ad hoc services: WordPress for your website, a separate billing provider such as PayPal. There were no really good subscription tools, and video streaming was all over the place. There was no app builder, nothing was straightforward. So the goal was to bring everything together.”

Knowing these services were what creators needed to put Uscreen very, very “early to the market,” Taei says. “The industry was not yet ready for what we had to offer.”

Most of the folks who would eventually become Uscreen’s future customers were just getting established on YouTube and beginning to experiment with things like merch and pay-per-view content. So Uscreen bade its time and continued to build out its stable of offerings.

Then COVID happened. TikTok dropped. And digital content production exploded.

The pandemic itself was obviously an unfortunate turn of events, but its impact on our industry was enormous. With lockdowns in place, more people than ever were watching digital content–and making it. Empathetic viewers, themselves cash-strapped by furloughs and layoffs, became keenly aware of how important it was to financially support art they wanted to see, and were willing to splash out on things like YouTube’s Channel Memberships and creators’ Patreons.

This was exactly the inflection point Uscreen had been preparing for.

COVID rapidly “accelerated the adoption of memberships and community,” Taei says. “In the last five years, the business began to snowball, because it was ready for what was required. We were looking so ahead […] and it really started to come to life.”

Through 2021 and 2022, Uscreen poured resources into further developing creator-fan connection and membership/paywall tools, as well as its app builder, which lets creators make their own branded content distribution and community engagement apps for mobile and TV platforms.

Now it’s reached a place where all creators have to do is bring their content, and Uscreen will do “everything else,” Taei says. It currently works with 4,000+ creators, many of them in fitness, educational, and entertainment niches.

But Uscreen isn’t done iterating. It just hit a major financial milestone: It’s helped creators bring in over $1 billion in revenue.

It also just launched memberships for Caleb Hammer‘s Hammer Elite, Theorist‘s TheoryVerse, and Keke Palmer‘s Practice by Palmer.

Why do these 4,000+ creators work with Uscreen? Both Taei and Allison Yazdian, Uscreen’s CEO, say it’s because Uscreen gives them more control over both their recurring revenue and their relationship with their audience.

Yazdian is the daughter of entrepreneurs, has a Stanford MBA, and started cultivating her skillset at Compass, a company that works with real estate agents. She then went on to spend two years as SVP of Creator for shopping platform LTK before joining Uscreen in June 2025. Uscreen’s business model taps into all the facets of her background.

“Content creators are entrepreneurs too,” she says. “At LTK, I ran various parts of their creator business, and creators have a very nuanced set of challenges, because they are very much building on rented land. They’re beholden to algorithms, they’re on these content treadmills. They’re very nervous about what the future holds and how to future-proof their businesses.”

She views Uscreen as the path to that future-proofing.

“[Creators] have to own the data, own the revenue, own the destination, and really figure out how to build sustainable revenue,” she says. “So when I started conversations with Uscreen, I was like, this is such an incredible solution for content creators who have built these amazing followings and communities on various social platforms, who have this incredible video catalog, for them to give their community more of what they want.”

Yazdian acknowledges that Uscreen’s offerings can compete with on-platform tools like the aforementioned YouTube Channel Memberships, but emphasizes that Uscreen doesn’t view YouTube, TikTok, or any other social platform as competitors.

“We love YouTube,” she says. “It’s our top of funnel. Platforms like YouTube let entrepreneurs build trust and community before they build a business. That’s what makes them so powerful. All you need is a phone and an internet connection and you can reach a global audience. I think there are a lot of people who have super niche content and, without these social platforms, would never be able to build sustainable businesses. These social platforms have a very important, critical place.”

But once creators have established their content, audience, and businesses, they need more support, she says. “Our mission and our vision is really about helping these entrepreneurs, these video businesses scale their impact and be able to drive connection.”

Taei and Yazdian each point to the creator-fan connection as the linchpin of not just Uscreen as a company, but of our entire industry.

“When you talk to our customers, they care so deeply about their community, and they want to build something really special for them,” Yazdian says. She pitches Uscreen’s creator hubs as blends of Netflix-quality UX for watching VOD and livestream content, plus a community discussion space that feels like “Facebook plus Discord.”

That space is “where the subscribers can actually start to connect with each other, and it feels more like a walled garden. It’s like-minded people who really want to be there. There’s no trolls, and people can be comfortable,” she explains. “We’ve seen these incredible situations happening where people are meeting up all over the country because they’re building these bonds.”

That’s Uscreen’s front end. The back end, where creators manage everything, is a “whole operating system,” Yazdian adds. “They can set up their content, but also their subscriptions, their packages, they can set up marketing campaigns…In the last year, we’ve built out a full people management, marketing, and automation CRM tool. Creators are collecting a lot of rich data around their viewership, and the CRM lets them trigger activations and segment their audience.”

Yazdian also points out that Uscreen differentiates itself by keeping close to creators. Instead of just handing them tools and saying good luck, “there’s a whole coaching and consulting layer,” she says. “We help them develop the strategies to be successful.”

Those strategies can include figuring out how to price subscriptions, designing a free entry point that catches potential subscribers’ attention, fleshing out Uscreen-specific content and marketing strategies, and figuring out how membership programs should add value for established communities without non-subscribed viewers feeling like something is being taken from them.

The end goal: helping creators build a “thriving, sustainable revenue business,” Yazdian says.

Want more details on exactly how Uscreen looks from a creator standpoint? In the coming weeks, we’ll be chatting with Caleb Hammer (whose membership program Hammer Elite is one of YouTube’s largest paid communities) about how he’s bringing his content to the platform, and using its tools to connect with his already thriving audience.

Stay tuned.

Uscreen is a Tubefilter partner.