I said content a lot
One of the more interesting things I’ve noticed over the last few years is the sudden shift in what we are watching.
For the first 20 years of my life, my entertainment hunger was satisfied through television. As a young kid, that might have been tuning into Sportscenter in the morning, or Drake and Josh in the afternoon. As I grew older, live TV began to vanish.
Time became irrelevant, and businesses began to understand that… Outside of news outlets and a select few live events, offering something at a specific time wasn’t necessary.
People didn’t care.
This ushered in the streaming era. Every big-name company offered some sort of streaming package.
It should be noted that all of these companies also must have made a pact with each other to come up with the least creative/imaginative names for these streaming services… I mean c’mon guys: Apple +, HBO Max, Disney +, Prime Video, etc. So weak.
Anyway, the streaming service entered our lives and dominated.
Netflix and Chill started as a joke but really turned into a lifestyle. The afternoon playlist always included 2-3 episodes of meaningless TV you’d seen too many times. On in the background, but never anything more.
This was our substitute for cable TV…
This ran all the way through Covid. Bingeing shifted from something that you should be ashamed of to something that was popular.
Something changed there shortly after though.
Bingeing became less popular. The world opened back up. And we had too many options. If every company offers a streaming service, how are you gonna choose which ones you want to purchase?
What a dilemma.
While everyone was deliberating between paying for Netflix or Hulu and Prime Video, Netflix and ESPN + or Apple TV and Disney +, YouTube TV and Max or the Cock (what I call Peacock, shoutout to me), ETC. I could go on and on.
Jesus.
This opened the door to the influencer era.
Our social media followings adjusted from people we knew to people that we wish we knew.
This opened a new world. No longer were credentials necessary.
As long as enough people like a person, they are viewed as credible. And their followers look to them for content.
This is our new media, like it or not.
The older people will say that we need more facts, and we need to listen to trusted people in the real media, and that’s fine. This isn’t me trying to convince you that one is better than the other, but this is me telling you that this is what is going on right now.
Kids my age and younger don’t care what is said, they care who says it.
If I want to know how to feel about the NBA, I listen to Bill Simmons. If I want to know how to feel about the NFL, I listen to Pardon My Take. If I want to learn about the shitfuckery going on in professional golf, I listen to No Laying Up or The Fire Pit. If I want advice on how to date a 34-year-old woman while simultaneously keeping my activity at my local strip club the same, I listen to the life advice portion of Ryen Russillo.
If you don’t want to tune into worldly news, you don’t have to. Your content absorption is whatever you want it to be.
Our content consumption is heavily dependent upon who we listen to, now more than ever. We listen to what they say, but we also watch whatever they create. Yes, they might start out as voices on a podcast or faces on a social media account, but they quickly substitute in place for those shows we used to watch.
Bingeing is still popular with the Olds, but these alternative sources of content are here for everyone else.
If I had a dollar for every time I was on YouTube watching something at home and my parents came in (completely perplexed at the concept of watching YouTube on a consistent basis), I’d have a lot of dollars.
Watching people has seemingly replaced watching episodes. As weird as that sounds, it’s true.
P.S.
I found an old archive of all of Bill Simmons’ articles and was astonished by the amount of work. My writing has gotten shitty so I’m going to try to put more stuff out, even if it’s as meaningless as this. Gotta start somewhere.