Easter Friday traffic heading past Nyon on the A1 motorway

YouTube And Sensationalism

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

I love the medium of video and I have love having a choice of thousands, or even millions of videos to choose from. In effect my love of the medium of video should mean that I love YouTube. I don’t, because of sensationalism and clickbait. 

I have paid for YouTube prime twice now, to cut out all the adverts, and I love that. In theory plugins do the same thing, for free, and I did use plugins for years before finally deciding to spend money on YouTube Prime. 

The thing that paying for YouTube Prime can’t remove is the sensationalist headlines and clickbait titles. It also doesn’t remove the content creators with a million viewers saying “please like and subscribe” ten seconds into a video. It doesn’t cut out of them saying “with my half a million viewers” and other grating phrases. 

The second thing I don’t like is having videos with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of views recommended. I want to find the smaller content creators that are sharing video for pleasure, rather than as a job. I want to use YouTube on a human rather than a broadcast scale. If I want to be an anonymous statistic I can watch mainstream media content. 

By showing content with hundreds of thousands or even millions of views it feels like an enormous amount of content is being ignored and silenced. We are seeing what the algorithms think everyone wants to see, rather than what individuals want to see. 

A content creator camps in interesting places with a diversity of equipment. It’s interesting until you notice that the content has a million or more views, for what would be considered junk, or a waste of time in other scenarios. 

It feels like a positive feedback loop. Popular content gets promoted so people watch it, and because people watch it it gets promoted even more. When I refresh YouTube today I get 6 videos, where I used to see 20 videos. The most popular content is forced upon us, making it even more popular. It feels like we’re being compelled to watch certain content, rather than free to choose. 

And Finally

I come from a time when we browsed the web. We had 20-30 articles and bits of news on a single page and we chose which content we wanted to view. Today browsing has been replaced by algorithm driven recommendations, so we are forced to see sensationalist, populist content, rather than something that is unique and interesting. We need to revert to browsing again. I don’t want recommendations. I want choice. I want to feel that I am not being forced to see content that an algorithm chose for me. I get fatigue, with YouTube today. 

Similar Posts

| |

The youtube application on the N95

Byrichard

For those of you with good data packages an application that could be a lot of fun is youtube on the n95. I was out and about and decided to check the youtube site and I was given the option to download their beta. I managed to play vides but I had no sound.

What they offer are:

  • upload your videos from the phone

  • watch your friends’ videos

  • view relatd videos

  • view received videos

  • search for content.

In other words you can do everything you’d want to from the n95 that you’d do from a computer. It does look like an interesting application although unless you’ve got wifi this is a very expensive gimmick. It’s nice to try nonetheless. Let me know if you try it and tell me what you think of it.

|

Rain and the Gear 360

Byrichard

Rain and the Gear 360 are well suited to the weather we are currently subjected to in Switzerland. For the past month and a half we have had rain almost every single day. As a result of this it has limited the number of opportunities to go out and get 360 footage.

360 camera rigs are not designed for rain. Most 360 rigs involve at least six non weatherproof cameras and rigs that are designed for dry rather than wet conditions. To go out in this rain would drown the equipment. With additional funds you could film in these conditions with weatherproof gear but the cost increases. Add to this that camera systems like the Ricoh Theta S prefer clear skies and nice weather for taking video and you see that it is not really worth the effort.

By the end of September the Samsung Gear 360 should provide us with a simple to carry, weatherproof 360 camera which could be fun to take canyoning (if they make a specialist housing) or hiking for doing other sports activities where weather proofing is a useful feature. The trend to make devices at least splash proof is good.

Another nice feature of this camera is the ability to use 200 gigabyte SDHC cards. with these cards you can record for hours. When the card is full or when you’re changing location you can change cards in seconds and continue working on a project. With the Ricoh Theta S you can record for 45 minutes before you need to transfer the footage, clear the memory and start recording again.

With 200 gigabytes of storage one concept that I would love to test is 360° time lapse videos. You could fix the camera to your bike, to a canoe or to some other object and set it to take a picture at regular intervals. So far I have not seen a mention of an interval recording mode but with 200 gigabytes you can record for hours without worrying about storage. You could change the speed in post production.

This camera records in UHD rather than HD quality. Video recording is at a resolution of 3840×1920. 360 videos taken with this camera should be more pleasant to view as a result.

The 360° video eco-system is still in it’s infancy and most 360 video solutions require people to use a number of cameras. Both Samsung and Ricoh provide all in one solutions along with software to stitch the images ready for post production. They are helping to democratise the medium both by making production cheaper but also by enabling people to produce content. This increase in content will encourage more people to get VR goggles which in turn will justify increasing the budget of 360 video production budgets. It will go from being a niche product to being mainstream.

Cat in a shark costume on a Roomba vacuum cleaner

Byrichard

Shark week is here and along with it so the opportunity for shark videos to appear arrives. In one case a cat apparently likes traveling around rooms on a roomba while wearing a shark costume. Why a cat would wear a shark costume is one question. The second is how you get the costume on the cat. It’s a cat after all. They’re known for their personality after all.

 

And if that wasn’t enough look at this chick and how he behaves.

Netflix – Browse By Language
|

Netflix – Browse By Language

Byrichard

Recently Netflix added a Browse by Language option which means that you can browse for content by original language. Yesterday I saw that I can browse for content in French, Italian, Polish,, Korean, German and many more languages. I could list more but that’s dull. Instead I want to focus on the opportunities it opens up. 



With YouTube, Apple Films and other platforms you can search for films but they are either in French, German or Italian in Switzerland and it’s hard to find content that is in its original language. 


For English speaking YouTube creators they always say with “frogspawn VPN you can pretend you’re in country A to watch content from there” etc. This does appeal to me in rare situations. What appeals more is the freedom to search for French, Italian or Korean content. By watching a film made in French, Italian, Korean or any other language you are entering a different culture. 


One of my favourite films, when I watched 90 films in the span of 9 months or so was that I saw films I would not otherwise see. Brotherhood, the Korean film is excellent. I also really enjoyed Hong Kong martial arts films. 


It is for this reason that last night I watched the King’s Affection, episode 1.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4zM7jHdVFc


With Netflix and Amazon Prime it is was to get stuck watching US and UK content without thinking of watching content in other languages. Netflix has now made it possible to explore the world of film and television, on an international, cross-cultural scale. You have thirty two languages to choose from. Now you see why I didn’t list them all earlier. 


Last night Netflix removed Young Sheldon from Netflix Switzerland so I was angry. I cancelled my subscription until I noticed the browse by language feature, and then Netflix became as rich and diverse as a film festival. By selecting Russian, Romanian, Telugu or another language you travel through space and time to other cultures, other values, and different ways of seeing the world. 


I had skimmed over Netflix France and noticed that they had a lot of extreme sports content. 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_86DhJsW2w


And Finally


Film and Television is a great way to discover new languages, new cultures, and new ways of seeing the world. By making Netflix more international they are helping to bring more people into contact with more cultures. This is good. 

| | | |

Spy-cam wildlife filmmaking

Byrichard

Spy-cam wildlife filmmaking is an interesting discipline. It builds upon the decades of innovation that the documentary film genre has built upon. From the earliest images by the Lumière brothers of the workers at a factory to the development of film editing by Eisenstein and Dziva Vertov demonstrated by “The Man With the Movie Camera to sync sound with the Crystal sound system used by Jean Rouch for Chronique d’un été.

The BBC is seen as the leading example of high quality television programming and this has been the case for decades. The Natural History Unit is responsible for some of the best wildlife documentary films and series and with good reason. They adopt the latest technology, hire crews for months or even years at a time, to capture nature’s spectacle and beauty, and bring it to living rooms around the world.

Sensory: BBC Wildlife Director John Downer & the technology of ‘spy-cam’ filmmaking from Getty Images on Vimeo.

This attention to detail and this dedication to getting the best images has resulted in some of the best looking documentaries around. the Blue Planet Series, the Planet Earth series, Life and others have provided people with what I like to call a video encyclopaedia of the natural world.

The technological innovation that we see in the video above demonstrates how animals and behaviour that we had seen through a tele-lens can now be seen up close and with as natural a behaviour as possible. Almost every book I have read about the documentary genre speaks about capturing life with as little alteration of natural behaviour as possible. This technology is making that wish a more realistic goal.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.