I don't disagree with this. But as I said they've alienated a very, very large pool of potential customers. Good luck to them, but they could have gone bigger.

EDIT: short of a Tyler Perry or Oprah Winfrey jumping on board (someone that has significant momentum), the only other way this survives is with an acquisition. Netflix would be primed to pick this up as the start of a black-interest channel within Netflix itself. If this is a real market Netflix will either buy them or start their own.

And just a note here - I care nothing about the racial aspects of it but do like it when companies and people win and thrive. I want to see that here too but I think they're lopping off too many potential customers.

If they succeed with their intended audience, it's not going to matter how their day-1 messaging touched jumpy message boards like us. The content will win or it won't. Looking all the comments on this thread, I think it'd probably be a pretty big mistake to try to make something that doesn't piss off some of these people, rather than --- as YC tells people to do --- making something that some specific people truly love.