Casey Neistat made me start my own cable TV company… on the Internet
It all started in 2013, when I left my mother’s house. The money was short, thus even though I had bought a TV and a Blu-ray player from her, I could only watch Netflix and other stuff I had in disc. So it’s safe to say that I wasn’t following the normal TV schedule, something I thought that was placing me ahead in terms of modern life.
I would never guess that one day I’d be thrown back to all that ancient channel thing, but here I am.
The first one was BRKsEDU. He’s one of the main Brazilian youtubers when it comes to video games (he’s actually a big deal globally as well). Since I was about to buy a PlayStation 4, I spent some time seeing these videos and bumped into his “The Last of Us” series. I liked the content and decided to stay.
This PS4 would be bought in New York, where I was going to with my girlfriend. Since we’d got the tickets months in advance, we saw practically every video about the city on YouTube. At some point during this madness the New Yorker journalist Seth Krugel created a channel called Amigo Gringo, in which he helps Brazilians to better understand the American city — and of course I hit the "follow" button.
This happened while I was planing to live in Ireland, so a channel that showed up on my radar was E-Dublin TV, another one focused on helping Brazilians to settle in a foreign city, and another one to get my humble "follow" action.
To be clear: these were not the first channels I followed on YouTube, but they were for sure the first ones I followed regularly. I was always waiting for their updates. However, I hadn’t noticed any behaviour change, because since the only thing I wanted was timely information, I had this feeling that at some point I would just leave all that stuff behind.
But then Casey Neistat happened
I work for a tech website. In July 2015 it came out the news about a certain app called Beme, which was being launched by the film-maker Casey Neistat. I wrote on the subject, and as I found Beme a nice idea it made me curious to know who that Mr. Neistat was. Lucky for me, he was doing a pretty consistent job to give me that information.
Casey had just started a daily vlogging format, thus there was a lot of content to cover. But I saw everything, from his daily updates to the viral movies, and without noticing I was hooked.
Now I see his channel as a sort of a TV series, and it has all the “musts” of a tradicional one: he counts episodes (we’re now following the second season), there are segments (“Mail Time” and “Q&A”), and sometimes he even posts special episodes — I’m sure you’ve seen the one where a friend of him becomes Aladdin thanks to a Boosted Board, or one of those picturing Casey and his friends snowboarding through the NY streets. And, of course, there are boring episodes that I simply skip.
When I noticed what was happening, I decided to organise my profile so that I would only follow the channels I really wanted to. Rapidly I created my own cable company, but on YouTube, and it’s doing pretty well with approximately 50 channels, each one following its proper schedule.
And my company is very eclectic, because, well… I am too. I have subscriptions on cinema (CinemaSins, Every Frame a Painting, How it Should Have Ended, Pipocando), technology and nerd stuff (Wired, Veritasium, Unbox Therapy, thegatesnotes, Nerdologia, Marques Brownlee), and journalism (Estadão, Nexo Jornal, tv Carta, TV FOLHA, Vox).
You may have noticed that I’m not a native English writer, but that's why I also follow some learning channels. Besides, there are a lot of uncategorised people among my subscriptions, such as Upworthy, The School of Life, The Creators Project, i-D, and I Like To Make Stuff — one of my favourites.
So, what’s new?
I am aware that YouTube is not new and it’s possible that none of these things I mentioned above will impress you, but when I realised that I had transformed what for me was just a repository for videos into my own customisable TV company… I was amazed. I’m not talking about famous teen youtubers, but channels with nice and serious schedules, and professionally created content, things we used to think that only big TV chains could afford.
So why am I writing about it? Because it’s been a while that tech companies understood that video is a really big thing on the Internet, and brands such as Facebook and Snapchat keep showing off large figures to argue that they are competing head-to-head, when in reality it’s not only the number of views that matters in this market.
We are ceasing to be “users” to become “audience”, and for people like me the experience is the only important thing. I’m not saying that Facebook won’t get there, because they eventually will, but at least for now nobody takes it from YouTube. As long as they have people like Casey with them.
Leonardo Pereira is a Brazilian journalist located in Dublin. He is a senior writer and proofreader at Olhar Digital and can be found on the Internet as @leeopereira.
