Format

The importance of the AVoD (Ad-based Video On Demand: the free streamers) in general and You Tube in particular is under everyone’s eyes. In a recent article, the format expert and columnist Siobhan Crawford, has pointed out that “YouTube is the single most popular platform for the 15-35-yer-old demographic” (see: https://tbivision.com/2022/11/23/opinion-why-you-should-look-to-youtube-for-the-next-big-formats/).
In line with this, UK free-to-air public broadcast Tv network Channel 4 has just launched a new channel called 4 Reality on YouTube, where you will see the full-length episodes of Channel 4’s most popular realities together with social shorts and exclusive new contents. 4 Reality will aim to engage a younger female audience aged 16-24 and will join other Channel 4 YouTube channels: 4 Comedy, 4 Documentaries, 4 Entertainment and the recent Channel 4.0.
The new series of Celebs Go Dating will land on the new YouTube channel immediately after the linear broadcast on E4 (owned and operated by Channel 4). In the format, single celebrities join an exclusive dating agency in an attempt to find true love and matchmakers pair them with non-celebrity partners.
Now the new frontier seems to be the FAST (Free Ad-supported Streaming TV) channels, basically the same thing as AVoD, but instead of ad-supported on demand content, it is ad-supported live TV content. The borders and landscape of the audiovisual are changing at an unprecedented speed.