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Comment by muhfuhkuh | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, there are companies blossoming based on people doing "let's play". Youtube is filled with partners making incredible amounts of money doing "let's play" videos and frag highlight reels with dramatic music and editing. Any random video garners between 500,000 and 1 million hits within days of uploading them. They become viral instantly. And, their subscriber lists hover in the millions, every one of them sitting through both pre-fill ads and sometimes interstitials (for 2+ hour playthroughs with commentary).

This market is not niche. It rivals cable TV shows in reach. And, demographically? Forget about it. They are the youngest and money-spendiest one out there. MTV wishes they could pull Machinima demographic numbers per piece of content (and for the price of content, which is an order of magnitude cheaper than the Situation and Snooki, that's for sure).

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1 million views worldwide is pretty niche in the grand scale of things. You would need growth on a massive scale before HBO is going to consider airing them.

How about

http://www.machinima.com/

2.25 billion monthly views.

Those don't really look like playthrough videos , they seem to be either live action stuff themed around games or shows that use video games as a mechanism for doing CGI.

Check out Machinima. They have 18 billion views in 2011-2012. That's billion with a B! Even with standard YouTube ad rates, that's a nice business. But they can bargain for higher rates because of their scale and audience demographic.

Nearly all their content is UGC gaming + parodies around that. Shockingly big market (shocking to a non-gamer like me). Twitch has a big opportunity.

No one is expecting Yogscast to be aired on NBC. But, how many kids you know watch Television in any quantity even approaching how much they surf and watch youtube on mobile and PC? That's the future of entertainment. Kids are getting endorsement deals and doing direct ad sales because they can 360-degree no-scope kill in Battlefield 3 and record it using fraps and voiceover some clever lines or overlay it with dubstep.

A lot of what I see people use youtube for is to show each other funny clips of shows from TV.

If that's not a joke, then you seriously need to look to other than 2 feet around you and and your own opinions to analyze a market.

I'm sure people watch all kinds of stuff, but BF3 kills however impressive aren't really a substitute for TV Drama.

Maybe for HBO, but a lot of basic cable channels would KILL for 1MM viewers. Heck, Mad Men only gets 2.6MM viewers an ep and that's a huge success. Not to mention the positive economic difference in production costs...

Then one has to wonder why they aren't rushing to get these people on their networks.

I remember a satellite channel experimenting with the idea of airing playthroughs of games. They were usually abridged to around 3 hours and did not contain the average playthrough banter you get with most LPs. Personally I enjoyed watching it when I with my dad. I have no idea if they're still around though or what the channel was called.

EDIT: I was trying to find it and found references to the show Cinematech although I'm fairly sure I watched a full playthough of Hitman and most of the cutscenes from Far Cry instead of just trailers over the course of 30min.

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