Why you enjoy so much watching videos with everyday activities
Did you watch more videos than ever during the lockdown? Did you find yourself preferring flipping furniture videos or all kinds of tutorials over a quality series or movie? Well, you are not alone and there is an explanation.
Watching videos together create a feeling of virtual presence, which works as a much-needed replacement of the physical one the world has experienced last year: people watched concerts together, birthdays, graduations, cleaning, studying…
The YouTube teams analysed the viewership, content, and creative trends that have emerged around the world over the past year, through billions of hours of watched video and they claim that one main finding underlying this behaviour: the increasing indispensability of video in people’s lives, primarily for a sense of connection.
Here are the three main trends that the specialists identified from analysing the viewers and creators behaviour:
1. Live and simultaneous viewing help people gain a sense of community
As countries went into lockdown, people turned to online video to fill the gap of human contact. Watching videos with others, whether physically or in the virtual world, heightens immediacy, generating a stronger sense of connection.
There was an explosion of live stream events, as viewers continued to seek out ways to be together and substitute the events missing from their lives: 85% of people have watched a live stream over the past 12 months, including events like weddings on the collective Korean channel Wootso and NASA’s Perseverance rover landing on Mars, which garnered more than 2 million peak concurrent viewers and 22 million all-time playbacks.
‘With me’ videos create feelings of nearness
Simultaneous content — where viewers can follow along while their favorite creators do prerecorded activities — also creates similar feelings of nearness and community. “With me” videos garnered over 2 billion views globally in 2020. Clean with me, decorate with me, or study with me are a handful of ways viewers have been creating community through company.
2. Viewers want more relatable content
Over the past year, as our homes became offices, virtual schools, and day care centers, the once clear line between our public and private lives disappeared. In turn, people felt less pressure to project unrealistic images of their lives and grew to expect the same of their favorite creators and the content they produced.
As late-night talk shows adapted to the pandemic, many of TV’s biggest stars started to seem like YouTubers, with the numbers to show for it.
The winners in the world of video are those who manage to break the fourth wall and pull audiences in with their relatability.
3. Immersive videos encourage togetherness
Using multisensory media to immerse the viewer in an experience is more popular than ever, as digital video pushes beyond expected audiovisual conventions and becomes more experiential.
While ASMR videos may jump to mind, other sensory formats like audio-first or first-person formats have emerged, such as video podcasts and cinematic first-person videos.
The term “first-person video” is actually borrowed from gaming, where first-person perspectives help create a feeling of immersion in the action or story. One example is Dream SMP, also called “Minecraft Hamilton,” a gamer-built world and roleplay-themed server with an improvisational plot starring amateur storytellers.
Videos related to Minecraft and with “Dream SMP’’ in the title have accumulated over 2 billion views since May 2020, making it the most popular entertainment phenomenon of the past six months.
Participating in video memes and trends has also become a popular form of immersive social entertainment.
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