The industry has collectively forgotten but Apple has already attempted this, with a show all my friends worked on called Planet of the Apps.. Yeah. Nobody cared. They spent The Voice money and got a thing you've never heard of.
What's interesting is it's not like Google doesn't have money, and it's not like Google doesn't have viewers. What they don't have is an appetite for long-form content, and what they don't have is a subscription model.
They do have the kids.
So. Expect a future of advertising-based unboxings, walk-throughs and algorithmically-generated children's cartoons. Because that's where the money is.
YouTube has plenty of long form content. And people make it with zero investment on the part of YouTube. But they definitely don't have a subscription model. I have never seen a YouTube Red show that I have any interest in watching and I don't think I'm in the minority.
If by "long form" you mean "someone yammering into a GoPro for an hour" than yeah, they do. If you're talking about "productions that hired a line producer" than no, they don't. Last I checked, content I mixed had something like 30 million views on Youtube. None of it is over 5 minutes long.
I'm not that old but that's someone yammering into a GoPro for a portion of an hour. Youtube is good for long discussions where people constantly talk and just go on. It may look prettier than someone talking on a shitty phone but the main point is that it's still the long yammering.
Jesus Christ. The bar to clear was long form. YouTube rarely recommends me a video that's less than eight minutes long. Contrapoints is a person talking into a camera. But it's long form content that kleinbl00 is pretending doesn't exist because he's an elitist or something. This isn't long form content because some angry old man disqualified an entire genre of video due to ignorance. But please jack off kleinbl00. I usually just observe his blindspots and watch him die on hills he created. Help him die there. There's a conversation to be had here but dude went straight for "I'm right" negating any conversation because he's never had an uninformed opinion and I'm usually wise enough to not provoke him