the smartphone, and a host of software technologies built on it,3 have birthed what is essentially a parallel, non-union, motion-picture industry consisting of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and their many other social-video rivals, all of which rely on the free or barely compensated labor product of people acting as de facto writers, directors, producers, actors, and crew. Even if they’d never see it this way, YouTubers and TikTokers are effectively competing with Hollywood over the idle hours of consumers everywhere; more to the point, they’re doing what any non-union workforce does in an insufficiently organized industry: driving down labor compensation.

Almost no one I know has work; most people’s agents and managers have more or less told them there won’t be jobs until 2025. An executive recently told a friend that the only things getting made this year are “ultra premium limiteds,” which sounds like a kind of tampon but actually just means “six-episode miniseries that an A-List star wants to do.”

YouTubers’ lack of collective bargaining power isn’t just bad for me and other guild members; it’s bad for the YouTubers themselves. Ask any professional or semi-professional streamer what they think of the platform and you’ll hear a litany of complaints about its opacity and inconsistency

Companionship content is long-form content that can be consumed passively — allowing the consumer to be incompletely attentive, and providing a sense of relaxation, comfort, and community.

Interestingly, each individual “unit” of music is short-form (e.g. a 3-5 minute song), but how we consume it tends to be long-form and passive (i.e. via curated stations, lengthy playlists, or algorithms that adapt to our taste).

If you’re rewatching a show or movie, it’s likely to be companionship content. (Life-like conversational sitcoms can be consumed this way too.) As streaming matures, platforms are growing their passive-watch library.

content isn’t always prescriptively passive, rather it’s rooted in how consumers engage it.

That said, some content lends better to being companionship content: Long-form over short. Conversational over action. Simple plot versus complex.

Short-form video requires more attention & action in a few ways: Context switching, i.e. wrapping your head around a new piece of context every 30 seconds, especially if they’re on unrelated topics with different styles Judgment & decision-making, i.e. contemplating whether to keep watching or swipe to the next video effectively the entire time you’re watching a video Multi-sensory attention, i.e. default full-screen and requires visual and audio focus, especially since videos are so short that you can easily lose context Interactive components, e.g. liking, saving, bookmarking,

With how performative, edited, and algorithmically over-optimized it is, TikTok feels sub-human. TikTok has quickly become one of the most goal-seeking places on earth. I could easily describe TikTok as a global focus group for commercials. It’s the product personification of a means to an end, and the end is attention.

even TikTok creators are adapting the historically rigid format to appeal to more companionship-esque emotions and improve retention.

When we search for a YouTube video to watch, we often want the best companion for the next hour and not the most entertaining content.

While short-form content edits are meant to be spectacular and attention-grabbing, long-form content tends to be more subtle in its emotional journey Long-form engagement with any single character or narrative or genre lets you develop stronger understanding, affinity, and parasocial bonds Talk-based content (e.g. talk shows, podcasts, comedy, vlogs, life-like sitcoms) especially evokes a feeling of companionship and is less energy-draining The trends around loneliness and the acceleration of remote work has and will continue to make companionship content even more desirable As we move into new technology frontiers, we might unlock novel types of companionship content itself, but I’d expect this to take 5-10 years at least

TikTok is where you connect with an audience, YouTube is where you consolidate it.5 Long-form content also earns creators more, with YouTube a standout in revenue sharing.

YouTube paid out $16 billion to creators in 2022 (which is 55% of its annual $30 billion in revenue) and the other four social networks paid out about $1 billion each from their respective creator funds. In total, that yields $20 billion.”

Mr. Beast, YouTube’s top creator, says YouTube is now the final destination, not “traditional” hollywood stardom which is the dream of generations past. Creators also want to funnel audiences to apps & community platforms where they can own user relationships, rely less on algorithms, engage more directly and deeply with followers, and enable follower-to-follower engagement too

Interestingly of course, an increasing amount of short-form video, including formats like clips and edits, seems to be made from what originally was long-form content.8 And in return, these recycled short-form videos can drive tremendous traffic to long-form formats and platforms.

90% of people use a second screen while watching TV. We generally talk about “second screen” experiences in the context of multiple devices, but you can have complementary apps and content running on the same device — you can have the “second screen” on the same screen.

YouTube itself also cites a trend of people putting YouTube on their real TV screens: “There are more Americans gathering around the living room TV to watch YouTube than any other platform. Why? Put simply, people want choices and variety … It’s a one stop shop for video viewing. Think about something historically associated with linear TV: Sports. Now, with [our NFL partnership], people can not only watch the games, but watch post-game highlights and commentary in one place.”

If I were to build an on-demand streaming product or any kind of content product for that matter, I’d build for the companionship use case — not only because I think it has a higher ceiling of consumer attention, but also because it can support more authentic, natural, human engagement.

All the creators that are ‘made’ on TikTok are looking for a place to go to consolidate the attention they’ve amassed. TikTok is commercials. YouTube is TV. (Though yes, they’re both trying to become each other).

certainly AI and all the new creator tools enabled by it will help people mix and match and remix long and short formats all day, blurring the historically strict distinctions between them. It’ll take some time before we see a new physical product + content combo thrive, and meanwhile the iPhone and its comps will be competing hard to stay the default device.

The new default seems to be that we’re not lonely as long as we’re streaming. We can view this entirely in a negative light and talk about how much the internet and media is contributing to the loneliness epidemic. Or we could think about how to create media for good. Companionship content can be less the quick dopamine-hit-delivering clips and more of this, and perhaps even truly social.

Long-form wants to become the conversational third space for consumers too. The “comments” sections of TikTok, YouTube and all broadcast platforms are improving, but they still have a long way to go before they become even more community-oriented.

I’m not an “AI-head” but I am more curious about what it’s going to enable in long-form content than all the short-form clips it’s going to help generate and illustrate, etc.

The foreground tends to be utilities or low-cognitive / audio effort (text or silent video). Tiktok is a foreground app for now, YouTube is both (and I’d say trending towards being background).

VidCon has “gone from weirdos to entrepreneurs.”Young people have increasingly turned to online video for entertainment. During the pandemic lockdown in 2020, digital content on platforms like YouTube and TikTok dominated, which experts at VidCon said helped propel digital media as a serious form of entertainment.

Digital-first talent are the power players today

It really drove people into watching creators, not as a hobby thing but as another linear option,” said Joe Gagliese, CEO of Viral Nation, an influencer marketing and talent management company.

creators are no longer just using social media as a jumping off point for bigger stardom. Instead, online content is the end goal. Over the years, content creation has become a serious and feasible career option for many.

Hecox said that toward the end of his and Padilla’s initial partnership, they gave priority to production quality in a way their audience didn’t like.“We had strayed too far away from digital and we started looking more like TV, and I think people didn’t connect with that,” Hecox said.

Instead of stretching themselves thin to fit a traditional mold, they've redirected their focus to their roots and what fans liked the best.

Meanwhile, whenever I talk to music people or book people, very quickly the conversation becomes a music industry conversation or a book industry conversation. What matters for music are artists and touring and labels and so on, and what matters for books are writers and publishers and rights and Amazon’s bargaining power in books and so on. These aren’t tech conversations.

Tech needed content to make their devices viable, but having got the content (by any means necessary), and with it of course completely resetting the dynamics of the industry, tech outgrew music and books and moved on to bigger opportunities.

All of this of course takes us to TV, the industry that’s next on the tech industry’s content journey. Just as new technology unlocked massive change in music and (rather less so) in books, it is now about to break apart the bundled, linear channel model of the TV industry (this is especially the case in the USA, which has a hugely over-served pay TV market). As this happens, there are all sorts of questions that follow on: what happens to channels that might be able to make more going direct to consumer (HBO, perhaps); what happens to channels that might benefit from being in a bundle and lose from having to go direct (ESPN, perhaps), where the syndication model goes, and so on, and so on.

Just as for music or books, though, these are all fundamentally TV industry questions. What viewing distribution, what rights structure, what exploitation chain, what relationship between creatives, financiers, aggregators and distributors - these are all southern California questions, not northern California questions. So, what are the northern California questions, and will this end up being any more strategic than books or music?

Amazon and Netflix have entered TV content creation and ownership in ways and on a scale that no-one from tech ever did for music or books. Amazon did try to get into book publishing and has a significant self-publishing arm, but it had little success recruiting existing mainstream authors; neither Apple nor Spotify created a record label.

Netflix, of course, is a TV company, in the context of this conversation - it isn’t using content for leverage for some other platform (Spotify is the same, without the commissioning). But Amazon clearly is using content for platform leverage - as something else to speed up the Prime flywheel. Prime has become a third pillar to Amazon’s business, next to logistics and the ecommerce platform, and Amazon is always looking for ways to add more perceived value to it, preferably with no marginal cost - TV content that it owns outright is exactly that.

You don't close your Facebook account - you just go there less. You might stop paying for the Youtube TV service, but that won’t cut off your access to any other part of Google - nor would anyone want it to - the purpose of these businesses is reach. Nor, really, will you fundamentally change your search behaviour if Google discovers the next Game of Thrones. That is, cancel Prime and you'd lose Amazon, but what do Google & FB have to cancel? Without some platform decision to lock you into, content is marketing, and revenue, but not a lever.

Apple has always preferred a very asset-light approach to things that are outside its core skills. It didn’t create a record label, or an MVNO, and it didn’t create a credit card for Apple Pay - it works with partners on the existing rails as much as possible (even the upcoming Apple Pay P2P service uses a partner bank).

Part of ‘content is king’ was the idea that (at least in theory) content companies can withhold access to their libraries entirely, and in the past one might have presumed that that meant they had the power to kill any new service at birth. In reality, rights-holders have always had too strong a need for short-term revenue to forgo broad distribution, and few of them individually had a strong enough brand to extract a fee that was high enough to justify exclusivity. They always have to take the cheques - individually to meet their bonus targets, and collectively to meet their earnings estimates.

This is a multi-sided market place with too many players on both sides for anyone to exert dominance: Apple dominated purchased music and Amazon dominates ebooks (thanks to the DoJ), but there is no such dominance on the buy or sell side for TV, for now.

The reason Apple TV, Chromecast, FireTV and everything else feel so anti-climactic is that getting onto the TV was a red herring - the device is the phone and the network is the internet. The smartphone is the sun and everything else orbits it. Internet advertising will be bigger than TV advertising this year, and Apple’s revenue is larger than the entire global pay TV industry. This is also why tech companies are even thinking about commissioning their own premium shows today - they are now so big that the budgets involved in buying or creating TV look a lot less daunting than they once did.