Cover for The Shadow Subscription

The Shadow Subscription

How Netflix Turns Non-Subscribers Into a Revenue Stream

A strategic whitepaper proposing how Netflix could monetize non-subscribers by acquiring and upgrading low-tier cable and FAST channels. The paper outlines a system for extracting subscriber-equivalent revenue from shadow viewers turning reruns into revenue and legacy infrastructure into a profitable, modern funnel.

Streaming StrategyMedia InfrastructurePlatform MonetizationAudience Funnels
Published: August 5, 2025
Updated: December 26, 2025
DOIRead Whitepaper

The Approach

Scott Jellen is an independent researcher working at the intersection of protocol design, rights modeling, and interoperability across digital and public systems. His work includes standards-oriented specifications, reference models, and published whitepapers that examine how incentives, governance, and infrastructure can be represented clearly and designed to scale. He is the founder of the Jellen Protocol Lab, which serves as the emerging home for this research. Flagship work includes the Universal Sports Graph (USG), a protocol-based framework spanning RFC-style specifications and a versioned reference registry.

© 2026 Scott Jellen. Licensing varies by publication.