YouTube is a TV formats playground

How YouTube has become a natural home for formats.

There has been a recent spate of creator formats being commissioned by TV or streamers, many of which will be familiar, for example Netflix with Hot Ones and the Sidemen’s Inside, plus of course Beast Games with Amazon.

However the two-way journey between online platforms and TV is not a new one. For many years, platforms like YouTube have been a place to identify new talent or creator formats, or alternatively treated by TV producers and networks as a playground to test out concepts before commissioning them for broadcast.

If you are interested in formats, then I’d recommend following

Axel M. Fiacco

and subscribing to his Substack Friday’s Espresso where he tracks TV formats, IP and trends.

TV by its very nature is cyclical, and this activity has seen various phases going back 20 years or so. In the early days, influencers or YouTubers were hired as presenters or contributors to TV shows with the goal of bringing their audiences to watch linear TV output. Over time, there were more commissions of creator shows that were closer in format and style to their own channel content, for example The Dude Perfect Show which ran on Nickelodeon from 2016 to 2019.

However still there sometimes could be tensions as networks didn’t necessarily see the audience uplift they were expecting and creators could find the constraints of TV frustrating compared to the freedoms their own channels offered them. As creator formats became increasingly sophisticated and attracted larger audiences, the power balance has also shifted where individual creators can have much greater leverage and control than in previous phases. Now, things are coming full circle where TV formats are being licensed to creators and whatever is produced is likely to be offered back to networks, streamers and broadcasters as acquisitions.

Read on for more examples of formats that straddle the worlds of YouTube and TV/streamers…