But while Please Subscribe‘s target audience is the digital community, the film will first be seen someplace relatively unexpected: movie theaters.

For one night only, Please Subscribe will be distributed theatrically, specifically, Tuesday February 5th at 7:30 PM. “Anytime you make a movie, your number one goal is to make it into theaters. So [this] is pretty cool and pretty important,” Dobi said via phone.

“We wanted it to be more of an event,” Dobi said about the decision to go one night only.

According to David Wengrod of Screenvision, which is handling the theatrical distribution, Please Subscribe will be available in 217 theaters nation-wide, including San Francisco and New York. You can even see it in Hawaii.

“We have a pretty good national footprint,” Wengrod said via phone. “If we’re getting people who don’t normally go to see a movie on Tuesdays — people who normally experience stuff through their computers — then we’re a success.”

Following the theatrical premiere, Please Subscribe will be released via Chill Direct on March 22 — Screenvision requested a 45-day window. The film will cost $7.99 for a DRM-free file — but it’s currently available for pre-order at $6.20, 20 percent off.

Grace Helbig of Daily Grace, one of the eight YouTubers profiled in the film, got involved because it was an opportunity to expose those who might not be familiar with the YouTube community to what. “It’s important because it’s a such huge industry and it’s growing so fast — so it’s important for people to understand what’s happening,” she said via phone.

“It’s a deeper and more personal perspective on what it means to be a YouTuber,” Helbig added.

Beginning in January, according to founder Rob Millis, the Dynamo player will no longer be open to any creators wishing to charge users for their content — instead, the company will be refocusing on white label services for those in need of digital distribution.

“Really, for us it’s about how the market doesn’t need a public option like Dynamo anymore — it makes more sense to go the private contract path,” Millis said via phone. “It’s been our best users and their needs who have driven this decision — our biggest users are people asking for more tailored develpment.”

Dynamo will continue to support existing projects that earn at least $100 a month — those not generating sales and continuing to use Dynamo as an archival player will have to pay a monthly fee to continue doing so. Future customers will have to contract with the company to distribute via the Dynamo player.

However, those contracts come with the options of broader services, such as iTunes distribution or custom app development. “You have professionals going to three different firms to get all these things, but we have enough expertise in these fields — we’d like to be a one stop shop,” Millis said.

Founded in 2009, Dynamo was early to the pay-to-play business model — its proprietary player, beta-launched in May 2010, let creators set the pricing and terms for their content, with a 70/30 profit split.

“Online revenue at that point was a 50 percent split with advertisers, with no real transparency,” Millis said. “Now, after being out for a few years, the market has a few options out there.”

Those options include companies such as VHX and Chill, which have both in the last few months refocused on creating marketplaces for paid content. But while Millis mentioned being intrigued by them — “VHX and Chill have interesting things they’re doing with destination sites and introducing people to content” — the company he was really interested in seeing move further into the paid content space was Vimeo.

“We’ve been waiting for them to get into this market for four years now,” he said. “If they take it seriously and move away from the tip jar beta testing approach, I’m much more confident about where Vimeo is in five years than Chill is in three years.”

When asked if there were things he’d have done differently over the course of Dynamo’s development, Millis said that while he would have made the same decisions, he might have made them faster.

He also mentioned that he “completely overestimated the foresight and innovation within Hollywood. It’s an industry and community that really wants to be more innovative but doesn’t know how to. It’s why Dynamo making changes, to help.”

“You beat piracy by making content available easily at a reasonable price,” he added. “That’s something the big media companies haven’t figured out yet.”

The site’s approach mimcs an idea first pioneered by Louis CK a year ago, when the comedian sold a DRM-free download of one of his live sets for $5 online

The new offering, dubbed Chill Direct, is a self-serve marketplace, meaning that anyone can sign up within minutes. The site offers creators the option to determine their own price for their videos, and charge anywhere from $1.99 to $49.99. Seventy percent of that revenue is handed to the creator, and Chill retains 30 percent, which cover the fees for payment services as well as hosting.

Chill’s new self-serve marketplace.

Chill is launching its new offering with eight titles including the documentary film Thank you for judging by Ugly Betty’s Michael Urie as well as a previously-unreleased comedy special by Maria Bamford.

Louis CK was one of the first prominent entertainers to try his luck with digital direct-to-fan sales late last year, and fans rewarded him with $1 million in revenue in just 12 days. Since then, others have joined in as well: Comedian Aziz Ansari, known for his role in the NBC sitcom Parks & Recreation, started selling a standup special of his own in March. Ansari’s online efforts were powered by VHX.tv, which also has been moving from video curation to direct-to-fan distribution. VHX has since also powered digital sales of Indie Game: The Movie, and this week started distributing the grindhouse classic Miami Connection.

However, there are some differences between VHX’s and Chill’s approach: VHX has been a lot more selective about the creators it powers with, and is also putting an emphasis on selling goods on artist’s own sites. Chill, on the other hand, wants to use its own website as a central hub, and is giving everyone the ability to sign up from the very beginning. “I believe in the idea of self-service,” said Norgard.

This isn’t the first time Chill has tried something new: The company launched in August 2011 as a kind of Turntable.fm for video. It refocused on social experiences around live streams shortly after, and tried to provide group viewing for content from sites like Hulu.com by the end of 2011. In January, it finally moved to its social video curation model. Norgard told me that social video curation won’t go away any time soon, and that both offerings might be more closely integrated in the future.

Check out an interview I did with Norgard a few months ago: