Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

MRSN4P t1_jadycxk wrote

Large viewership on various platforms is attainable. It sounds like you’ve come to the quandary of mass appeal that public broadcasting has struggling with for decades. Despite having quality content about important issues, public broadcasting is widely viewed as tepid/boring. So, this might sound peculiar, but consider examples of media that have talked up to their audience and succeeded with mass appeal. If you are appealing, viewers will get others to watch the content through word of mouth. I think it might be worthwhile to ponder the appeal of (bear with me)

  • “Tough Jobs” which are fundamentally about learning how some jobs are done and sometimes offer segments of these people explaining the impact of what they do(but in my opinion, not deeply enough);

  • late night comedy shows which have educational segments (John Oliver just did a decent introduction to various forms of “AI” and the controversies around each;

  • Star Trek:TNG, which did not go deep but presented moral and ethical struggles, and I would argue was encouraging the audience to think in a more sophisticated manner (I’m talking average high school educated citizen of the 80s here);

  • Solarpunk as a genre: it involves both struggle, appreciation for small moments in life, and making the best of what you’ve got. It has an implied hope for the future, and does involve some escapism from our present through imagining that future hope, but also subtly acknowledges that our systems are broken and the way we do things are causing catastrophe and must change. The flavor of this genre could be a guideline for an aesthetic/atmosphere that integrates such elements.

6

Electron_genius OP t1_jae16vz wrote

Remarkable analysis u/MRSN4P! Thank you for the input. I had a similar train of thought, the content that is "educational" is often not fun to watch. Mathematics, for example, is very objective, there is no story other than the one you create around it...

What I am working on right now is a whole platform separate from the noise, that way people have a single place to go to and to some extent escape. I can link to a more detailed description of the project if you are interested.

2

MRSN4P t1_jae2vnc wrote

I think you should link to the project so that more people might check it out. Also, even with a separate platform, I think it is extremely likely that you will need multi-platform ads or small segments as a wide net to draw more people to your platform, just like getting people to check out your channel on existing platforms. This is a marketing/presentation problem, not merely a per se content problem.

4