The long & short of it.
Long-form or short-form? · Thai creativity FTW · Chupa Chup’s game of games · Adrian Brody’s internship ·
🎧 Prefer to listen? Hit play above to listen to me read this week’s dispatch.
For a very quick look at what we have today, you can watch this super-short clip- or just skip ahead and read!
If you watch a lot of content online, how much does the duration matter? Do you think in terms of long-form and short-form? A recent report from Tubular Insights suggests that both might suffer from misperceptions. Not only Youtube, Tiktok too is seeing a rise in appetites for longer content. I wrote about it this week, with Tubular’s data and a look at the import (or lack) of video durations.
▶️ In some very fun Curated/Cuts, there is a long overdue dose of Thai creativity, and Chupa Chup plays a wacky game in India, while elsewhere some creator magic shines in Live events.
➕ Plus, nuggets in kids content, journalism and Singapore cinema; and Adrian Brody has a new short docu. Of sorts.
This is the Colour Bar- where creativity, content, culture, tech, brands & humanity collide.
🎬 Curated/Cuts.
Lets start with some Thai advertising, because hey- we all need a dose of Thai creativity every so often.
1. Pointlessly pointed.
What’s the point? It’s a good point. Especially because there’s no point. Just many points. So everything has a point.
Thai humour at it again, this time of the deadpan, nothing’s-really-dramatic-at-all variety.
· from Happy Ending Film & director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit for Wolf BKK ·
2. Vantage creative
This is the kind of video coolness we have got to see on social that we may well have not seen just a few years ago. Wonderfully creative work at the BNP Paribas Open earlier this year, where a seeming single shot shows us star players and fun moments across the tournament grounds, seen from a distant vantage point. Lovely!
If you enjoyed that, have a look at some more from creator Ari Fararooy here, including a wildly popular one with Lisa at Coachella.
3. Games of Games
Sweet. Sour. Unpredictable. Fun.
A wacky take to get this across for Chupa Chup Jellies in India.
from Jamic Films fand Nikhil Rao for O&M.
The Long & Short of It.
Circa 2019, I remember hearing people refer to 12-minute videos as “long form”- less than half a typical TV episode. That struck me- not because 12 minutes felt particularly long or short, but because it stood for how much was changing. Short, long- the terms were becoming malleable.
The elasticity has only grown- shaped by your age, your role, the platform of choice, and your intent. What felt definitively ‘short’ at five minutes- suddenly wasn't. Videos held that title until shorts started measuring themselves in seconds, not minutes. Yet, shorts now run for minutes again, and long-form is whatever creators- or platforms- say it is.
The terms barely feel like time measures- they seem entirely shaped by context, usage and most of all, by platforms.
Platform vs. Preference
Tubular’s recent reports on video length offer a glimpse. Take YouTube: videos over 20 minutes account for the majority of total watch time. On TV, yes, but even on mobile devices, videos longer than 20 minutes account for the largest share of total watch time. Mobile devices account for 69% of views but TV screens account for 42% of total minutes watched, even though they make up just 16% of total views. While YouTube Shorts dominate in engagement and impressions- even for creators/brands who usually have longer videos- they’re clearly discovery tools, not destinations.
On TikTok, it's ‘same same but different’. Most branded uploads in the U.S. are under 30 seconds. But the top-performing duration is 1–2 minutes, followed closely by 2–5 minutes. Even more interesting: from Q1 2024 to Q1 2025, TikTok videos in the 15–20 minute range saw a whopping 56% increase in average views per video. On a platform that has virtually defined short-form culture.
The Pendulum.
The underlying theme across platforms is, supposedly, purpose. A 30-second clip can entertain or provoke a quick reaction. A 10-minute video can explain, explore, or storytell. A longer livestream is about connection.
So why the pressure to constantly go short?
There’s long been a fixation on shrinking attention spans, despite repeated calls for nuance. Such attention‑economy tropes have cemented the primacy of rapid consumption. Shrinking attention spans have been a self-fulfilling prophecy- creators believe only short content works, so they only make short content, keeping the scroll going. With the rise of Tiktok videos, it became all about vertical video, trending audio, quick editing tools, and quicker dopamine hits.
Extended Cut. But then, platforms must jockey for deeper engagement, more presence and more opportunity to serve advertisers. And so, the raising of ‘ideal lengths’.
TikTok, initially limiting videos to 15 seconds, gradually extended its maximum length. It now allows uploads up to 60 minutes and actively incentivises creators to make content over 1minute long. They’ve even given us landscape mode, once considered a tell-tale sign of “those not moving with the times”! On the other hand, Youtube’s Shorts started as 60sec or less; in Nov 2024, they’ve bumped up to 180sec, as has Reels on Instagram.
How much of this is a response to user preference, versus shaping it?
A Moving Target.
Video length remains a key metric, but also feels like a moving target, shaped by a tug-of-war between platform algorithms and viewer desires.
Platform choices steer behaviour on both sides of the equation- what gets surfaced, what gets monetised, and what gets rewarded.
But viewers still matter. Long-form videos, podcasts, explainers, gaming streams continue to thrive. We may not always be in charge of what shows up in our feeds, but what we stop for, what we watch through, what we seek out? That’s ours. Still. Mostly.
Lucas Shaw stated recently that “The traditional short-form video is a dying art form. People on YouTube either watch something that is really short or pretty long.” Plenty of creators would push back on that. The high views on Youtube Shorts are an impressions play- their actual level of entertainment and even funnelling to longer videos still not a given.
The line between what we want to watch and what we’re fed has always been blurry. We’ve celebrated the supposed liberation from scheduled TV programming, but tell me you don’t sometimes pause to think that algorithmic feeds have simply replaced the gatekeepers- and they often feel just as influential, if not more so.
For creators, the pressure to adopt a multi-format approach is very real. Creators risk spreading themselves thin juggling Shorts, Reels, TikToks, and long-form… but risk obscurity if they don’t.
And always, for us viewers, I must battle the persistent feeling that our habits, our preferences are being led far more by the platforms than we might realise, definitely more than we care to admit. This is not a bleak view- there is so much fine content still being made.
What is carrying us through— and will take us through the sometimes cynical dopamine hunting— is two-fold: intent- on the part of both viewers and creators, and desire- to produce something sustainable, meaningful.
The best part- you really don’t need to care about the clock, as long as what you watch is worth your time.
Hey, kids.
For a look at the kids TV/content market, there is a pretty good overview in this CNBC piece. It includes a look at how kids content can help manage churn, the similarities and differences in the licensing approach from the likes of Netflix, Disney+ and WBD, and their interplay with Youtube. “If you’re not on YouTube, it’s like you don’t exist for kids.”
Yet, while some are doubling down (with licensing or some original pushes), others are walking back their investment. WBD didn’t renew its rights to Sesame Street (Netflix picked it up), and across the pond, Sky Kids’ announced it is withdrawing from original commissioning in the UK. Their titles made up 27% of all TV animation commissions announced in the UK in 2024. The move also marks Comcast's broader withdrawal from commissioning kids' TV content (excl. movies) across its global subsidiaries, as it redirects focus toward a licensing-based approach.
Get Real.
Much of what I think and debate with other journeymen in our wider media and creative world, circles around how AI will impact us, what we make and what we consume. Trust and reliability is a key concern. A recurring theme is retaining the human value. Sure, it’s not a new take; one that even runs the risk of becoming a cliche. “Our humanity will shine through”, is something I have been guilty of happily and freely repeating (though that does not mean I believe it less).
I enjoy how 404 Media’s
reasonably speaks of the need for us to double down on the humanity. In writing about media companies- specifically journalism- he questions if doubling down on AI is any kind of strategy.“Becoming more “efficient” with AI is the wrong thing to do, and it’s the wrong thing to ask any journalist to do. The only thing that media companies can do in order to survive is to lean into their humanity, to teach their journalists how to do stories that cannot be done by AI, and to help young journalists learn the skills needed to do articles that weave together complicated concepts and, again, that focus on our shared human experience, in a way that AI cannot and will never be able to.”
His is a well-reasoned, impassioned call for real media. Because in this age, revisiting the human value is not just merited, but needed- and from different voices.
The sweeping flood of “AI-first” needs nuance for it to actually work, and for us to build anything that is (a) sustainable and (b) valuable (read: of value to who it is meant for- consumers, readers, watchers).
So AI is destroying traffic, ripping off our work, creating slop that destroys discoverability and further undermines trust, and allows random people to create news-shaped objects that social media and search algorithms either can’t or don’t care to distinguish from real news.
➕
Adrian Brody has a ‘docu’ with Porsche, where he is an intern at the Stuttgart facility. Trailer. It is essentially a long branded piece, and the internship angle wears off pretty quick. Personally, I would have enjoyed something more creatively distinct, with an attention to filmmaking craft that reflected the carmaker’s famed passion for their craft. But the heart seems in the right place and Brody’s clearly into cars, so that helps. Full video here.
Netflix’s first use of genAI in an Argentine scifi show. "That sequence actually is the very first [generative] AI final footage to appear on screen in a Netflix original series or film. So the creators were thrilled with the result”
Recent news in Singapore highlighted the beleaguered state of cinemas in the country of 6million. Old time chain Cathay Cineplexes looks set to shut down its last remaining screens.
has a pretty in-depth look at how the landscape looks dimmer than we might realise, saying, “Audience attendance has collapsed, leaving cinema chains on life support, while, with one notable exception, Singapore’s own filmmakers lack commercial success.”Goodreads has a new logo. Maybe you stopped using it, maybe you never did. Its where people track their reading, build community and more.