The Rest is Video: Why user-generated content is an endangered species
Opinion
Netflix is absorbing podcasts while independent creators achieve studio-grade production. When everything looks like television, advertisers need a new way to tell what’s actually worth paying for.
The cool thing about these [elephants] is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”
Twenty-one years after 25-year-old YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded those words as the platform’s first ever video, the V&A acquired “Me at the zoo” and put it on display in the Design 1900–Now gallery at South Kensington — alongside objects that have shaped how we live, work, and communicate.
The museum’s digital conservation team spent 18 months reconstructing the original YouTube watch page around it, right down to the old-timey Adobe Flash Player controls.
Eighteen months of conservation work. For that…
But the V&A is right to put this in a museum. YouTube (you’ll have noticed), is doing just fine, but what that clip represents about YouTube is disappearing.
The term “user-generated content” only ever worked because there was an obvious visual gulf between what a user could generate and what a professional could produce.
The gap between those two things wasn’t just aesthetic; it was the entire sorting mechanism of the video economy. It told advertisers where the premium environments were. It told consumers what to pay for and what to watch for free. Professional versus amateur.
That sorting mechanism is broken. And the gap is closing from both directions at once.
Netflix is betting on podcasts
Netflix won’t have Batman and the Sex and the City girls after all, but is playing a shrewder game than paying through the nose for a legacy media giant.
Let’s call this strategy ‘reaching down: it has signed deals with Spotify, iHeartMedia, and Barstool Sports to bring over 30 video podcasts onto its platform.
Why bother with conversations filmed with a handful of cameras? Because it is losing the daytime battle to YouTube. According to Nielsen’s January 2026 data, YouTube commanded 12.5% of all US TV viewing while Netflix sat at 8.8%. Podcasts are Netflix’s play for those hours: cheap to license, easy to produce, sticky enough to keep the app open between the binges.
The World Cup will supercharge this. Gary Lineker’s The Rest Is Football — already pulling seven million monthly streams — will run as a daily Netflix show throughout the tournament, filmed from a studio in New York. A podcast sitting alongside Stranger Things in your Netflix queue? To go with the other recent oddities of mobile games and WWE wrestling?
Buying WBD would have undoubtedly supercharged Netflix’s library. But this video podcast play suggests Netflix is becoming a platform.
And from below, independent creators are reaching up. Cal Newport — the Georgetown professor and productivity author — recently recorded a MasterClass and was struck by the production gap. A typical top-tier podcast runs on two DSLR cameras and a couple of twenty-somethings. But his MasterClass shoot involved a crew of over 20: a director with television credits, a make-up artist fresh off a Ryan Coogler film. MasterClass is not a studio or a streamer — it is an independent company achieving studio-grade visuals.
Newport’s question — what happens when more independent creators close that gap? — is already being answered. Dropout, the comedy streaming service born from the ashes of CollegeHumor, now has over a million subscribers, is profitable, and produces content visually indistinguishable from Netflix’s unscripted slate.
The barriers to “looking like television” are falling every quarter.
The advertiser’s shortcut is broken
So here’s the problem: for decades, advertisers relied on a simple shortcut: if it looked like TV, it probably was TV.
And it came with everything that makes TV advertising effective: regulation, independent measurement, human-verified ad placement, audience trust. The production quality gap did the sorting for you.
That shortcut no longer works. When a Netflix podcast, a Dropout comedy show, and a Goalhanger World Cup studio programme all look equally like television, the visual quality tells you nothing about whether the environment is regulated, independently measured, or brand-safe.
Some of those environments will have those things. Some won’t.
This matters enormously, because video isn’t just another format — it is the format. As Elliott Millard, Thinkbox’s chief strategy officer, put it at the marketing body’s conference last week: “The average person now spends about 75% of their media day with video formats.”
The Profit Ability data backs him up: total TV accounts for less than three-quarters of advertising spend but generates nearly 84% of the profit. The commercial stakes around what qualifies as “TV” have never been higher.
This is why Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos now frames YouTube and Instagram as direct competitors, not other streamers.
Last month, his prepared remarks to the Senate antitrust subcommittee mentioned YouTube 25 times. That is not the behaviour of a company confident in its competitive separation.
What should replace it?
So if production quality can no longer do the sorting, what can?
Millard offered an answer at the same conference. He argued the industry needs to stop drowning in acronym soup — BVOD, SVOD, AVOD, FAST — and think about “total TV” as a single environment available in two modes: mass and addressable.
What qualifies rests not on what content looks like, but on whether it is regulated, professionally produced, independently measured, and verified by humans.
That framework has always been useful. But in 2026, it becomes essential.
It also means Goalhanger — the business behind The Rest Is Football, The Rest Is History, and The Rest Is Entertainment — is arguably the most important independent media company in Britain right now.
Its Netflix World Cup deal is a proof of concept: a podcast operation landing a global streaming deal for the biggest sporting event on the planet. This is a template that indies are following, but YouTube is no longer the only game in town as a shop window.
So the V&A was right to put “Me at the zoo” behind glass. It belongs in a museum — not because it’s old, but because the world it represents is vanishing.
It also means the end of buying ads based on what content looks like and a better understanding of what it actually is.
The platforms that can demonstrate regulation, measurement, and trust will continue to command premium prices. Everything else is just video with good lighting.
Omar Oakes was the founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years.