I have recently presented 2 live stream chats on my very old YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/bobbyllewellyn
They were great fun to do and the questions I get asked are always funny, sometimes funny cruel and often fascinating and insightful
I won’t dwell on the fact that I’m amazed that anyone knew I was doing it (about 80 people watched the first one) because that account has been dormant for 9 years, but there is a certain charm to the fact that I’m still mystified by the intricacies of the internet.
Where did they come from? How did they know?
Okay, I posted a link on Threads, but I have 10,000 followers on there, not like the old days on nice preMusk Twitter where I once had over 180,000.
However, what I can’t help contemplating is if there is, or can be, a connection between this Substack account and the stuff I could put out on YouTube.
I know I can link the two together, I can mention Substack on a YouTube stream and I can post links YouTube on here.
What I mean is in the actual content. For example what would it be like if I read out my substack articles on a livestream and then responded to comments that people make on YouTube? Or I tried writingn a substack article that incorporated the torrent of funny and enlightening comments as I wrote.
Literally live blogging. Would that work?
I genuinely can’t tell what might be interesting and informative, and what might be a sticky dollop of self referential, narcissistic dullness.
Ever since the mid noughties I’ve been fascinated by the developments in video and media in general facilitated by this world wide web gubbins.
It all seemed so exciting in about 2006 because up until then, for any individual to broadcast anything required literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of £$€ just to get started.
Not only the cost, the complex and highly political relationships you needed as someone who wanted to communicate with the endless confusing churn of gatekeepers at large media houses.
As we all know, many of those big institutions are now on their knees, who knows how wonderful organisations like the BBC will operate in 10 or 20 years time. How can a big old TV company change the way they operate to even begin to compete with the likes of Mr Beast or Marques Brownlee to name but two.
And those are the ones an old fart like me has heard of, I know there are folks on TikTok and Instagram etc with equally large followings I never have or ever will have heard of.
So I’m very grateful that 18 to 20 years ago I was thinking about all this stuff. I’m grateful to the many clever, well informed people who helped me stumble through this new world back then.
I followed the developing technology and the distribution systems with obsessive interest. I tried all of them, some worked for me, others not so much.
I feel so blessed that what started off as a daft experiment 14 years ago, The Fully Charged Show has grown into the niche success story that it has.
(It was our 14th birthday last Thursday)
But I’m still interested in finding other ways and indeed other topics to use this incredible technology.
I am fully aware of the negative sides to it all, sitting on a train in London where literally every passenger is staring at their phone, the hideous toxic sludge that took over Twitter, the impact of smartphones and social media on the very young. It’s an unimaginable world for an old git like me and I can’t help be anxious about it.
But there is so much positive stuff going on as well, and learning to focus on that rather than some vile hate filled failure who trolls around being cruel and ignorant might be a good thing.
So I suppose I’m asking for some kind of feedback.
Robert it was a pleasure to see you on YouTube this past week and I hope you will do more of those. I always caught your Periscope streams and I missed them when that site died. I made a no budget film in 2009 and you were kind enough to give me permission to use sound from a Carpool episode in the background, Chris Barrie was doing a Danny John-Jules impression. I’ll always be grateful for that. Hope to see more of your streams on YouTube. Thanks! Geoffkryten is my handle for everything since 1995.
Deffo like the idea of you reading your Substacks on Youtube and responding to responses live. I liked your setup and even the aesthetics of the room - the nice blue walls and the Fully Charged sign give some lovely background. The way I found out about the first of these 2 broadcasts was that I happened to be on Twitter and one of the big Red Dwarf fandom accounts tweeted that you were live. I've now subscribed and put on notifications so hope to keep catching the broadcasts.