Welcome to the video bloat era

If the goal of streamers once seemed to be prioritizing and supporting great series from a diverse group of interesting creators, that goal seems to have shifted from making better shows to just ... making more of them. As viewers, we’re being flattened by a fire hose of programming — and the experience of watching TV feels like a ritual of submiss... See more

We already seek out this content density in other mediums. A tightly edited YouTube video is typically more engaging per second than a recording of a meandering live stream. A big-budget prime time show beats public access television. A methodically researched essay or deeply reported scoop beats a frantically-written hot take. A song beats a jam s... See more

“Genre, medium, and format are secondary concerns and, in some instances, they seem to disappear entirely.” One piece of intellectual property inspires a feeding frenzy of podcast, documentary, and miniseries offshoots. Single episodes of streaming-service TV can run as long as a movie. Visual artists’ paintings appear on social media alongside the... See more

When you think about YouTube or TikTok or any of these platforms, the creators who have risen on these platforms, it’s very unlikely they would have risen through traditional channels. If they said, “Give me money to go make a movie, it’s going to be 90 minutes of me jumping into slime,” that probably wouldn’t have worked. But then they can start a

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People are shocked by the notion that MrBeast can have 20 times the reach of the largest newspaper in the world. But even more shocking is the fact that this cultural shift is still in its early stages.  You ain’t seen nothing yet, folks.  And all this is happening much faster than most people realize—especially those who live inside the

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