New developments over the weekend illustrated the growing importance of geek culture to streaming services, including YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix.  Nerdist Industries, in partnership with The Jim Henson Company, GeekChicDaily, and Broadway Video Entertainment, with strategic partners including Soapbox Etnertainment and The Chrenin Group, announced that it would be one of around 100 new YouTube channels being created for original programming.  The range of content in the new channels is broad, including some from Websites (Slate), comedy (The Onion), TV (WWE), sports (SB Nation), and from fellow geek culture channels such as Stan Lee’s World of Heroes (in partnership with Vuguru) and Machinima. 
Anime is already established as an important component of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.  The past weekend, the New York Times noted the popularity of anime on Hulu, which offers 9,500 anime episodes and where four of the top 40 titles in October were anime.  Naruto Shippuden is the sixth most popular series on Hulu. Netflix offers 4,000 anime episodes.
Hulu SVP Content Andy Forssel described the strategy for the Times. “Networks might be happy to get a show that 20 million people kind of like,” he said.  “We’re more interested in finding a show that a million people love to death.” 
Hulu gives distributors like Funimation a revenue share of the advertising shown during the shows.  The anime producers and distributors get a legal way for downloaders to view anime online (some series appear as quickly as 48 hours after their debut in Japan), a precursor to more lucrative DVD/BD sales.  Content can be edgier than that shown on television. 
Streaming over-all is reaching critical mass as a distribution channel for video content.  It’s taking up a huge percentage of the available bandwidth on the Internet.  Movies streamed by Netflix account for 32.7% of U.S. downstream traffic during peak evening hours, an increase of over 10% since spring, according to a report by Sandvine, Inc. Netflix tops YouTube (10%) and BitTorrent (9%).  That's a total of over 50% of Internet bandwidth consumed by only three streaming services.  The good news for content producers is that over 40% of that 50%+ is used by legal channels.
With those kinds of macro trends for streaming services, and niche content playing an important role in their development, it appears that geek culture has a major new way to reach its audiences for video content, one more open than broadcast or cable TV.