Patreon is, today, one of the most popular and used patronage platforms. And there are many reasons for this, since the service allows creators to fine-tune support levels, rewards for each one of them, in addition to providing the necessary communication tools between creators and their community, to encourage interaction between both parties, one of the functions most valued by many of its users.
So much so, in fact, one of the most valued rewards for many are priority communication channels with the creator. Either directly from the private feed provided by the service, with access to exclusive channels on Discord servers, as is the case with comedian David Suárez, or with monthly live streams in which the creator and followers can talk about all kinds of topics, such as It happens in the case of Jaime Altozano, this type of interactions are always valued in a very, very positive way.
Another advantage provided by patronage through Patreon is access to exclusive content, which in many cases is videos. Eye, this is not to be confused with patron exclusive previews, because in this case the creator uploads the video to whatever platform it is, usually YouTube, but keeps it hidden and not indexed. This way, only the people who have the direct access link can see it. Hours or a few days later, the creator changes the status of the video to public and, from that moment, it can be seen by everyone.
I am not referring to this type of privilege, also quite common, but to videos recorded exclusively for patrons, videos that are also uploaded to YouTube or other platforms, but are kept permanently hidden. However, in this case, many creators fear that the links will end up being made public and, in this way, the exclusivity of this content will be lost. This is why, for a long time, a common request from creators to Patreon is that the platform allow videos to be uploaded to private feeds, so that they can only be seen by patrons.
And the good news, as we can read on Engadget, is that Patreon has finished testing in this regard, and has already started offering some Patreon accounts the ability to upload their videos directly to the platform. At the moment, the function is only available for Pro and Premium type accounts, but it is because at the moment it is in a limited phase of early access, probably both to test its operation and assess its reception and, in parallel to the latter point, to properly manage the provisioning of resources that may become necessary if the volume of video to be served is very high, and even more so if it is necessary to carry out some type of transcoding in real time, that is, when serve it.
