Credit: Curiosity Inc.

We all know streaming services’ usual tricks for making more money: get more subscribers, charge those subscribers more money, and sell ads. But science streaming service Curiosity Stream is taking a new route that could reshape how streaming companies, especially niche options, try to survive.

Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks launched Curiosity Stream in 2015. The streaming service costs $40 per year, and it doesn’t have commercials.

The streaming business has grown to also include the Curiosity Channel TV channel. CuriosityStream Inc. also makes money through original programming and its Curiosity University educational programming. The firm turned its first positive net income in its fiscal Q1 2025, after about a decade of business.

With its focus on science, history, research, and education, Curiosity Stream will always be a smaller player compared to other streaming services. As of March 2023, Curiosity Stream had 23 million subscribers, a paltry user base compared to Netflix’s 301.6 million (as of January 2025).

Still, in an extremely competitive market, Curiosity Stream’s revenue increased 41 percent year over year in its Q3 2025 earnings announced this month. This was largely due to the licensing of Curiosity Stream’s original programming to train large language models (LLMs).

“Looking at our year-to-date numbers, licensing generated $23.4 million through September, which … is already over half of what our subscription business generated for all of 2024,” Phillip Hayden, Curiosity Stream’s CFO, said during a call with investors this month.

Thus far, Curiosity Stream has completed 18 AI-related fulfillments “across video, audio, and code assets” with nine partners, an October announcement said.

The company expects to make more revenue from IP licensing deals with AI companies than it does from subscriptions by 2027, “possibly earlier,” CEO Clint Stinchcomb said during the earnings call.

Put another way, Curiosity Stream, previously considered a streaming firm, is also now squarely in the AI licensing business. This isn’t a side gig; it’s one of the streaming company’s key pillars (alongside streaming subscriptions and ads) that it hopes will fuel years of growth.

Speaking at Parks Associates’ “Future of Video” event this week, Needham Co. analyst Laura Martin noted that Curiosity Stream is licensing 300,000 hours’ worth of its own content, as well as 1.7 million hours’ worth of third-party content. Curiosity Stream splits the AI licensing revenue with those third parties, she said.

In fact, Curiosity Stream is peddling more content to hyperscalers and AI developers than it is to streaming viewers. The company’s library includes 2 million hours of content, but “the overwhelming majority of that is for AI licensing,” Stinchcomb said.

“We are increasing our volume of rights in our traditional platforms, but the overwhelming majority is for AI licensing,” he added.

A new way forward

Curiosity Stream’s success with licensing content to AI companies could interest other streaming companies that are contemplating additional sources of revenue to fund new content, as well as technology, marketing, talent, and other initiatives, and to please investors. At this week’s event, Martin warned that other content-centric companies will need to find new revenue streams, as Curiosity Stream has, or else be “put out of business by their competitors.”

Further tempting streaming companies with original programming and connections to IP holders, Stinchcomb believes that the opportunity is growing.

“In 2027, possibly earlier, as more open source models become accessible, there will potentially be hundreds and even thousands of companies who will need video to fine-tune specific models for consumer and enterprise purposes,” he said.

Still, it’s risky to assume that licensing content to AI companies is a long-term business. In this nascent stage of generative AI, it’s unclear how much and for how long hyperscalers will be willing to pay content companies. Ongoing litigation may also impact how companies treat IP leveraged by LLMs. Like other organizations that have recently turned to licensing content to AI companies, including Ars Technica owner Conde Nast, IP licensing can be a lifeline that simultaneously feeds what may soon become rivals.

But as it stands, not every streaming service is likely to survive the next few years. Streaming customers are increasingly complaining about how hard it is to find stuff to watch. People are getting annoyed with having multiple streaming subscriptions, and there’s strong demand for less content fragmentation.

As such, more mergers and acquisitions are expected among streaming companies. And so, in many ways, it seems a critical time for streaming services to build value quickly. Licensing IP to data-hungry, capital-happy AI companies could immediately help. But the long-term consequences remain difficult to pinpoint.

For its part, Curiosity Stream is still looking to grow its subscription and ads business. And executives would have you believe they are thinking long-term about AI deals. Per Stinchcomb:

We also see real opportunity for licensing beyond simply a training right. Additional grants of rights, like display rights, or transformative rights, or adaptation rights, or even certain derivative rights, or possibly even some that are as of yet unnamed. I mean, we’re building long-term relationships, and we’re committed to making sure that as we enter into all of these agreements, it’s not one and done.