I Wish Streaming Services Would Learn These Lessons From YouTube

YouTube is technically an early pioneer of the streaming industry. The only real difference is that the content is provided by users. Now, big-budget productions saturate our various streaming subscriptions, and yet so much of it rings rather hollow. Maybe these big streamers can learn something from the little people who make their own videos.

More Authenticity, Less Cheesy Polish

I like to watch YouTube to learn about things, and long-form YouTube essays are a great way to do this. It’s how I learn a lot of computer history, for example. There are many brilliant creators on YouTube who edit and publish videos that are entertaining, without resorting to terrible dramatization, or corny CG rendering.

Instead, we usually get someone telling a story who really seems to care about the subject, and not someone who cares about presenting. Sometimes you get a gem like Mike Rowe in the Dirty Jobs series, but most of the time, TV program presenters come across faker than a three-dollar bill in my opinion. I’d rather hear a passionate amateur talk all day than a practiced talking head. Think of programs like Megaprojects by Simon Whistler.

Get to the Point

YouTube has shown us that people value their time, and in my own YouTuber experience some of the most common community feedback I get is appreciation for brevity and clarity. I’m not saying that the big streaming boys should switch to making five-minute shows exclusively, but a lot of “original” non-fiction streaming series are frankly stuffed with filler to drag out how long subscribers spend binging on them.

I feel like this is a holdover from how weekly TV shows, hungry for ratings, used to be produced. However, you don’t have any ads in your shows (well, mostly) and you’re dumping an entire series in one go in many cases. So why have all the cliffhangers and fluff? It costs you money and wastes the viewer’s time.

Frequent and Consistent Releases

The production cycle for most YouTube content is short and frequent. Few if any TV shows have ever attempted this, with perhaps the exception of South Park, which has such a short production cycle that episodes could practically comment on current events.

Most non-fiction streaming shows have long production cycles, giving us a handful of episodes every year or every six months. So you’ll watch the episodes and forget about the series completely. If you’re going to do weekly episode releases as some streaming outlets have not started doing, in defiance of the binge culture that made streaming a success, I might add, why not just keep it going? With a decent buffer, some shows could be written to have proper weekly releases.

The thing is, I figure streaming giants have become risk-averse, and so they want to release a smattering of episodes of a program before deciding if it’s worth paying for more. However, the thing they might not always get is that having frequent and consistent releases, and becoming part of someone’s routine, can provide that grassroots level of support that makes some shows popular.

Not every show has to be like this, but having the Netflix equivalent of Good Mythical Morning means you have people logging in to your streaming app every day or every week. It doesn’t even matter if that show is a loss on the balance sheets, because getting people to open your app is a major achievement, and they might stay for something else while there.

Listen to Feedback

One of the major innovations streaming providers have brought to the table is their use of algorithms to help guide what sorts of shows to create. Sometimes this worked well, other times it resulted in programs that defy explanation. YouTube creators get direct and immediate feedback from their viewers, and while you need to be savvy and know what comments are useful and which are silly, viewer feedback is invaluable.

I’m not suggesting they go back to the old style of focus group work for show production, but giving us better feedback opportunities than a thumbs up or down is probably a good idea.

Learn To Experiment

If you use an algorithm to distill what’s made something popular or good in the past, then inevitably you end up with programs that are safe, but do nothing truly new.

YouTubers often have the leeway to try something new and wacky, to see what sticks. It’s through experimentation that some channels break out of what they’d been doing without much success, and however they manage it, I think more experimental stuff included in the budget would do a world of good, instead of Love Island season 26.

YouTube itself could learn something from its content creators when making its own YouTube content, which ironically is YouTube trying to be like the big budget streaming services, when I personally would rather watch YouTube than most of what’s on the “proper” streaming channels.