The homes we create in adulthood reflect our childhood memories and dreams. The nooks and corners we create in those homes are often the places we inhabit the most and, perhaps more than ever, we are using comfortable, familiar media to aid in their creation.
“Imagine you walked into an old English pub in the middle of the countryside. You look around and playing on a couple of old CRT TVs is footage of old football matches from years past; of interviews with players from 20 years ago. You might not necessarily be engaging with it, but it is adding to the overall vibe and ambience of the place you are in,” says Josh ‘Strife’ Hayes, a video game content creator and streamer.
“Background noise, background media, background visuals, help to create an ambience. It creates a situation. It turns a space into a place. That’s all I’m doing.”
Hayes has built a career on the back of creating long-form content for the second screen, setting the mood for his million-plus subscribers across different YouTube and Twitch channels.
His longest YouTube video, at 73 hours, compiles his entire playthrough of a popular role-playing game called Morrowind – a game considered pure nostalgia by affluent, nerdy millennials. The 73-hour video is not designed to be watched at the edge of your seat. It is merely an accompaniment to life, work, or sleep.
“Someone once told me that I make ‘perfect second monitor content’, and I decided to fully lean into that,” Hayes says. “My videos are playing while you’re doing something else, and that is still a level of privilege and prestige.”
“I am adding to whatever emotional context you need at the time, and it turns out that a lot of people need that.”
Content now fills the foreground and background of our lives and a single screen is rarely enough to do the job. We use one device in the foreground for either work or entertainment, while another device plays something less demanding of our attention, drowning out unwanted noise or filling silences we would rather not explore.
This background content – increasingly prevalent in our modern lives – is either something we have already watched or something that doesn’t require our consistent attention. It could be a music playlist, a season of our favourite show, or a multi-hour stream fronted by a creator like Hayes.
“I have the deep, dark secret that I probably watch [cult cartoon series] Archer more than any human should watch it,” says Jeff Nathenson, former head of football at YouTube and more recently the managing director of Team Whistle’s international business. “It’s my comfort food. I put it on, it’s in the background, and I really enjoy it.”
If you loved a piece of content the first time you watched it, the chances are that you’ll come back to it at some point in the future – even if it’s 20 years down the line. Prison Break, a drama released in 2005, spent the whole of September in Netflix’s English-language top-10 as people indulged in content they loved and were familiar with.
Nathenson continues: “Parents wonder why their kids will watch other kids playing video games like Roblox or Minecraft for hours on end on YouTube. They don’t recognise in their habits that there’s also a degree of comfort in repetition.”
“Most people want comfort food. After a day of slogging away at school or at work, you just want to shut down. You want a bit of chewing gum for the brain.”
Sporting pride
Film, TV, music, podcasts and radio are often designed to be the backing track of our lives, but there is one genre of content that always wants to be the centre of attention.
Live sport is always produced with your primary screen in mind. It’s no wonder – sport is one of the most valuable content verticals in the world, earning over $62bn in global media rights fees alone in 2024. However, sport, much like all other kinds of content, can sometimes be the mood music playing in the background while phones, computers and conversations occupy our conscious minds.
“People are too fixated on which screen people are looking at, when our lives are composed of multiple screens at once,” Nathenson explains. “You’ll have your phone right next to you at the same time you’re talking to me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if your TV wasn’t on in the background as well. That’s just the way that we operate in a multi-screen environment, and one of those screens will be live content.”
Sport can sometimes be the mood music playing in the background while phones, computers and conversations occupy our conscious minds.
“The sports industry, by DNA, is focused on whatever is tomorrow or next week – never yesterday and never in five years time,” Marinone told The Long Game. “One thing I’ve discovered by working with the sports industry, while looking at it completely from the outside, is that all of these rights-holders have massive archives, which is a gold mine.”
Marinone believes that sport’s obsession with immediate hampers its ability to be a bigger part of people’s lives. In particular, she believes that archive content could be the sports industry’s way of serving those ‘memories of protection’ we crave.
A big part of Nathenson’s remit at Team Whistle was to do exactly this, working with the Premier League to bring its archive to life on YouTube, expanding the league’s presence in people’s lives in the foreground and the background.
In particular, Nathenson pushed the Premier League to keep things simple with its YouTube output, focusing on long-form archive compilations designed for casual, non-committal viewing.
“Archive has so much more value in this kind of algorithmically driven world, and few organisations really take advantage of it,” Nathenson says. “Rights-holders think of archive as being a documentary series looking back on the life of Ayrton Senna or something like that. In reality, long mashups of great moments is just really good content for people, whether that’s on a primary or secondary screen.”
Marinone continued: “What is vintage to you may be brand new for somebody else. And usually, this vintage, archive content is already being distributed by non-official channels on YouTube. Rights-holders are neglecting the demand.”
She continued: “Rights-holders should do more, but they are in a phase where they don’t know what to do with all of their archive. They are afraid of putting a lot of effort in and aren’t sure what they will get in return. They are only focused on tomorrow.”
Taking the opportunity
For the past few years, YouTube has become the platform of choice for consumers seeking long-form comfort food, helping the Alphabet-owned company grow into a major media platform that rivals Netflix, Amazon and Disney.
YouTube’s primary mission is to become the app of choice on connected TVs, where watchtimes are longer and advertising revenues are higher. As such, YouTube rewards creators that can produce sticky, long-form content that viewers don’t click away from.
YouTube values content that appeals to slightly older viewers from first-world countries, paying higher ad rates for those viewers. It also rewards creators with one-topic, one-format channels that produce content in a roughly consistent format.
In other words: YouTube is a platform perfectly suited for the ambient, background, archive content that sport is yet to fully lean into.
Nathenson’s experience of managing YouTube content for the Premier League confirms this hypothesis: though it produced plenty of expensive, primary screen content aimed at younger viewers, archive compilations were always among the highest-performing videos on the league’s channel.
“Far too often, rights-holders are trying too hard to create gimmicky, viral videos when it’s just mostly about meat and potatoes,” Nathenson says. “When we were doing the Premier League, we were putting together long-form compilations – just great, edited mashups. They were getting better viewership on the archival compilations than they were from more current feature content.”
He continued: “YouTube is a lot easier than people think it is, and rights-holders tend to get distracted with the things they think they should be doing, because they’re too busy trying to imitate Mr. Beast. They aren’t understanding what their audience and community wants.”
Meeting the demand
Over his eight years on the platform, Hayes has come to understand exactly what his community wants. He has been on YouTube since 2017 and has learned the nuances of the platform, augmenting his content to the dual needs of YouTube and his viewers.
His different content formats are separated on different channels, but rarely deviate from reviewing or playing video games that are between 15 and 25 years old. Hayes believes this to be a nostalgia sweet spot for audiences on YouTube, with plenty of learnings available for sport.
He explains: “If I make a Roblox or a Minecraft video, I might be appealing to 14 to 18 year olds, globally. If I make a video covering Baldur’s Gate, a 1998 RPG, suddenly a lot of the people who played it are now 30-40, male, often in relatively affluent jobs. They are a valuable marketing demographic, and I captured that with my RPG reviews.”
Hayes spends weeks crafting videos for his main channels, but sport has the distinct advantage of having huge amounts of ready-made product. Archival compilations and even full match and event replays require far less work and contain almost all of the attributes required for good background content.
“The reality is that people spend, on average, 25 to 30 minutes watching an old football match that might be even from the 90s, where the picture quality is so poor you can’t even recognise who’s who,” Marinone says.
“The first thing that I would tell any rights-holder in sports is explore whatever you have in your archive, because that’s valuable. It’s a very good entry point for funnelling the audience and being discovered by core fans.”
Nathenson cites WWE – YouTube’s foremost ‘sports’ channel – as a shining example of how sport can do YouTube well: its content ranges from box-fresh clips of just-aired content, to multi-hour streams of archive content. And, as Marinone points out, that archive content is primary screen viewing for a brand new fan keen to learn about a sport they have recently begun to love.
“My eight-year old son came up to me the other day and asked me if I knew who Rubens Barrichello was! He’d watched a 45-minute compilation of his best moments on YouTube and it just goes to show: what is vintage to you may be brand new for somebody else,” she says.
YouTube is a platform perfectly suited for the ambient, background, archive content that sport is yet to fully lean into.
“My son loves F1 and he loves discovering more about it – you can find two very distinct types of users with this content and usually, this content is already being distributed by non-official channels on YouTube. That’s because rights-holders are neglecting the demand.”
For Hayes, who operates as a one-man band, it is far harder to meet that demand than it is for a sports rights-holder with significant resources to invest. And yet, it is Hayes that currently meets that demand better than the majority in sport.
His advice?
“You can aim at the people that want super artistic, super detailed, 20 minute videos. Or, you can just give people who want something in the background, something. And by giving people stuff that they want in the background, I’ve managed to make a decent career.”
