I remember when everything was recorded and edited videos, from short to long, maybe 5 minutes to 1 hour, but it was rare seeing longer videos. Most videos where edited, cutting off boring parts, and videos seemed centred on the content. Also facecams, while still gaining popularity, were not omnipresent.
Nowadays I find it hard to find videos that are not just reuploaded streams. Hours and hours of unedited video. Most of the time seems that the streamer really do nothing, they vaguely read comments, talk about their life and sometimes play a game or something, but the unedited nature of it make it really boring for my taste, there are lots of long dead times where nothing really happens. Also there are constant interruptions, visual and audio noise, the whole every time someone suscribe or paid something noisy has to happen for everyone to see. That takes the quality of the content down. And of course half the screen is covered by face cam, chat, subscriber count, donation objetives, etc. And the streams are always hours and hours and hours, the content is so diluted in long periods of time, it’s unrespectful with out time.
I just don’t see how this format has taken over the internet, it’s worse than what we had. I see how it’s more profitable for the creators, more hours of content for less effort, but I don’t get how viewers prefer that format over a well curated and edited video.
Just a rant. Maybe someday someone searches “why everything is a stream nowadays” and sees that they are not alone, I hate streams too.
I don’t really mind streams, as I mostly just…Don’t watch them. Very rarely I’ll watch the odd stream with small streamers that I kind of enjoy hearing their live commentary, and afterward they typically edit them into separate parts if they do upload them.
More than streaming overtaking a lot of online stuff, I find myself more bothered by the move to video over written essays/blogs. I’ve watched a number of video essays and enjoyed them, but I’ve rarely gone away from many of them thinking, “You know, this really was better being a video.” Instead I tend to think, “I feel like I could have read this faster than the time it took to watch/listen to.”
It’s possible I’m overestimating my reading speed, admittedly, but it doesn’t change my sense that many video essays don’t do enough with the visual component to justify being video essays.