YouTube’s New Content

The New York Times “Critics Notebook” came down hard on YouTube’s attempts to create TV-like content. See the full article here, and now some highlights…

Do you agree, or have a different thought?

  • With regular weekly shows and viewer-friendly playlists, they are indeed slightly more televisionlike than the millions of mostly homemade videos that surround them.
  • But the harder they try to resemble television, the less interesting they are.
  • All of these shows could, with minor modifications, look at home on television, and the production values on many of the new channels are comparable to those on the lower and middle regions of cable.
  • On the other hand, entire categories of these new YouTube channels — on pop culture and gossip, music, sports, women’s topics — mostly feel like imitations of what cable outlets like MTV, Spike and Bravo already do… There is also a sameness to them
  • Watching these channels, in their bland uniformity, underlines a continuing reality… there are unbridgeable differences between YouTube and television.
  • The shortness and vast abundance of videos, along with the easy but largely random nature of navigation among them, make YouTube an oddly static, timeless experience, no matter how quickly you click from one video to the next. Its channels are video archives, not places where one show follows another.

4 thoughts on “YouTube’s New Content”

  1. Hasnt this ALWAYS been the Knock on youtube? I firmly believe that Youtubes lack of organization as far as talent goes, has always been its achilles heel. If youtube ACTUALY programmed content instead of letting it appear all willy nilly, they could push the whole experience to a new level: ex: Have programmed nights during the days of the week like Music Mondays, Comedy tuesdays, Funny Farting in Public Wednesday etc etc and feature content that IS connected. Lack of programming Vision at youtube will always be the Bane of Our Existence there. i mean cute funny cats punching you in the gonads is only funny for so long…oh wait bob sagat made a career out of that didnt he? 😛

  2. Watching YouTube videos it is feeling like watching TV, big time. The content, the ads, the general “fakeness”..it all resemble the other medium too much. Apart for few YouTubers, the place is starting to stink a little. I hope I’m not being too dramatic. I’d say then, that I agree with the article.

    In the end, I turned to YouTube because TV content is generally quite bad (apart from few TV shows), a random guy making a video while trying to resemble TV like content is just wrong. No, really.

  3. Nalts, you’ve been recycling this YouTube-wannabe-TV meme in one form or another ever since Steven and Chad made their tap dancing KINGS video.
    In that time, YouTube’s competitors & alternatives have gone down instead of up. The potential is still there.

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