A medium, not a genre

YouTube

A weekly interview show shot in a warehouse, released an episode at a time to an audience that found it on its own, is not a television programme that happens to be online. It is its own medium, with its own economics, its own formats and its own century-defining accident of timing — and we catalogue it as one.

Film and television are mediums here. So is this. A series carrying the YouTube medium reads as YouTube everywhere on the site — in its page header, in search, in a person’s credits — instead of borrowing a television label that was never accurate.