The entertainment sector is certainly large. Even the biggest industries in the sector eat each other alive for business. We can look at industries that deal in the mulch-billions whereby prominent players get shut down or go out of business. Lots of people biting that one apple, to be sure.
That said, it's a numbers game. You don't win in the entertainment business catering to the diehards looking to find some monetary profit, you win by catering to the masses (unless you have a business model modest enough to be supported by those few, but we're not really talking industry scale in most of those scenarios). Poker makes it's money on the fish. Video games don't make their money because of eSports, they make their money on those that can barely coordinate both thumbs. Professional sports leagues make their money on those that watch their sports, not those that participate. The NFL is the most watched professional team sport by women, with some estimates of up to 1/2 of all women in the country watching the sport, despite the fact almost none of them have ever even played organized football, much less have been paid for it. The idea that some may be able to make some money doing these things is certainly an allure for some, but most accept the reality that, at the very least, they better have something to fall back on.
As the NCAA so happily likes to trumpet: almost all athletes will go on to do something other than professional sports. The NCAA has championships in 23 sports, many of which are played by both sexes, and yet, for the vast majority of institutions only men's football and basketball could be considered revenue sports.
I would cite this forum as evidence that one reason pool is not as successful as some would like is because not enough attention is paid to simply 'having a fun night out'. Think of the myriad of 'pool is dying' type of threads on this site and then think of how many of them revolve around incentives other than financial. How many of them are stories of the game just being fun. Or how people play the game simply for the competition. There's not very many in those threads. In fact, I've never seen anyone else even mention the cultural aspects of a game's popularity in those threads, and that's an enormous part of why anything is popular at any time, in any region, amongst any particular group of people.
There's not much that is going to make that go down easier, I'm afraid. We live in a world where millions complain about how little they got for 99 cents on a mobile game!
There's a reason sports channels fight so hard to not only get on service providers but to get on their basic tiers. It's very hard to get customers to pony up for additional content. Sports like college football do everything they can to have a game not be on PPV, because very few fanbases have ever supported it well enough to make it profitable. There's a sports channel on many providers that provides soccer and rugby matches for 15 dollars a month and it's not something that has proven popular in those communities, and this is at least the second venture to attempt that channel. Quite simply, it's seen as too expensive for one channel. Price, especially in a PPV, is a considerable consideration.
I'm going to be very blunt and say that approach will never get you anywhere. You never want to put the burden on your would be consumers. People on this site clearly want pool to succeed, and as can be seen in many places they want to see people make a living playing pool. There are lots of reasons why such a venture wouldn't work, including purely economic ones. This quote is a bit of a guilt trip, and that will only deter those would be consumers.
We're talking about 10,000 dollars, correct? How will that amount change the pool world?
There are several posts in this thread that challenge that 'simple' premise. No one is denying that the potential professional aspirations can intice players to play, but there's a simple economics argument that is fundamentally missing here. For every person that makes that $200,000, you need many multitudes supporting them. A rock star may make a kid pick up a guitar, but it is those that don't know a bass from a treble clef buying their songs, merchandise, and tickets that made them that money.
To at least attempt to convince a community that is mostly already on your side, you're going to need to do a far better job coming up with an argument than what I've seen in this thread or that website. To convince those outside this community, and most importantly, those that currently don't consider pool as something they should be concerned with, you're going to need to do much, much more than that. Making others wealthy is generally not an argument to convince people to put up the dough, as alluded to above. The merits of a 'trickle down' economic structure have been exalted for hundreds of years, but remains unpopular because it is very hard for those supporting the top to see how it benefits those at the bottom.
Being purely constructive, as most in this thread are, does that free video sample showcase this?
What I did like was your video of you candidly talking about this project. There's a human connection there. That's why hustling stories are popular. That's why Earl Strickland is popular. Sure, he's a good player, but his antics are entertaining (to some). Those poker players you see on TV are popular because they're personalities. There's a good reason NBC spends so much of its time with human highlight pieces during its Olympic coverage. You may not care about horses jumping over things, but you may relate to that rider and that may be the enticement that gets you to watch something you may have never tuned into otherwise.
The most interesting thing in that video of you talking is much of what you describe is simply culture. That's why soccer is 'boring' for you, but baseball is boring for others. There's something about soccer that isn't boring or billions wouldn't watch it. That connection with the Steelers you describe is a product of culture. Years and years of investment with that city, that franchise, and the people develop that culture. A new sport doesn't have that culture in that city. Lots of sports have made the mistake of assuming that simply putting a city name with no connection would create these kinds of rivalries. Those human connections, those cultural connections are very important and they take time to develop, often generations or longer. Does this financial model allow that to happen, that's what you have to ask yourself.
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