DigitalRev TV DEAD

[FHDcrew]

Looks like DigitalRev TV deleted 100% of their YouTube videos.  RIP the old GH2 and 5D Classic videos I used to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/@DigitalrevTV

[FHDcrew]

In all seriousness though, very sad.  Such an iconic piece of photography history; I loved their stuff.  I just got into video right as Kye was in his last year with DigitalRev, but suffice to say I really enjoyed his content and still enjoy his independent reviews.

[newfoundmass]

It's a damn shame that it was all deleted, and completely unnecessary. Shams on whoever made that call. 

[eatstoomuchjam]

It's a weird decision - that was evergreen content that cost them nothing to leave up and, assuming they're in the YPP, probably made them a small (but non-zero) amount of money yearly.

[Emanuel]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigitalRev_TV

https://petapixel.com/2016/11/29/kai-leaves-digitalrev-7-years-shenanigans-strikes/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCknMR7NOY6ZKcVbyzOxQPhw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFgtoTSPMhk

 

[Eric Calabros]

Its was not like they host those videos and can't pay the bills. Maybe was about copyright issues. For any reason its ridiculous to delete a part of history overnight like its your draft folder. 

[MrSMW]

All those wideos gone, but at least Kai and Lok live on independently elsewhere...

[kye]

It sounds like a very "business" decision to me.

That's the intellectual property of <holding company name> so <no-one else can have it / no-one can have it for free / we don't want to risk being sued during the transfer process / etc>.

If this was a company permanently closing a storefront / restroom / whatever during a business reshuffle then no-one would bat an eyelid, but when there's any element of common good then people notice.  Unfortunately, the idea of a sharing economy is basically incompatible with a zero-sum-game business mindset, which is where the confusion / reactions start.

There's a fascinating relationship between the social contract and the legal frameworks that control how businesses deal with the public, and people often react very differently to how business people would think they do.

[Andrew Reid]

Might be Kai wanting to pull it?

[kye]

5 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Might be Kai wanting to pull it?

Would he have any say in that?

My guess would be a change of management / ownership.  Does having a YT channel with backlog of videos require any work at the back-end?  If it was generating spam or unhelpful customer enquiries or something maybe they just pulled it to save on some kind of management effort required?

Or maybe it was a PR decision and the content was just dated?  Things move fast in consumer electronics after all..

[EduPortas]

One of the weirder moves in the YouTube sphere lately.

Prob some kind of lawsuit by an ex-employee or something, seeing the way the channel imploded was not amicable at all. Management, talent, producers, the new guys. It was all really embarrassing considering they were one of the premier tech channels out here.

They basically deleted their history as a brand (no one really visits their site, and if they did it was thanks to the YT channel).

We'll see.

[PannySVHS]

3 hours ago, EduPortas said:

They basically deleted their history as a brand (no one really visits their site, and if they did it was thanks to the YT channel). We'll see.

Now that! It was super enjoyable to watch Kay on DigitalRev, always quirky, fun, exiting, even whimsical, great locations and occasions, colabs, just the whole thing. To delete that treasure is not only dumb but in a way crudest cultural vandalism the way they did it.

[Yannick Willox]

The only logical thing is about possibly revenue from ads not going the right direction, so somebody forcing the channel to close ? No pay for anyone.

It is almost always about the money.

[Andrew Reid]

8 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

To delete that treasure is not only dumb but in a way crudest cultural vandalism the way they did it.

I don't know about cultural vandalism.

That's a bit like saying if BBC accidentally deleted 2 episodes of Teletubbies, culture takes a knock 🙂

[PannySVHS]

4 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

I don't know about cultural vandalism.

That's a bit like saying if BBC accidentally deleted 2 episodes of Teletubbies, culture takes a knock 🙂

Kay would be able to come up with a funny reply I imagine.:) BBC rocks and so did the Kay era on DigitalRev. Anything after him was like Teletubbies following after a Studio Ghibli film. 😊

[MrSMW]

Tinky Winky asks Totoro to hold his/her/their beer.

[newfoundmass]

Even if the content wasn't always great, it's a shame when stuff just disappears and isn't preserved somewhere.

[Andrew Reid]

7 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

Kay would be able to come up with a funny reply I imagine.:) BBC rocks and so did the Kay era on DigitalRev. Anything after him was like Teletubbies following after a Studio Ghibli film. 😊

I never really rated it that highly TBH. The format was a good idea... Top Gear of cameras, but it wasn't really was it. Kai is no Clarkson. Half the time he was just mucking about and he couldn't shoot, didn't have the eye for it. Style over substance. Whereas if they had executed on the format in a more creative way it would have been fantastic. Some proper jokes and personalities, not just the innuendo and mucking about, would have helped. Look at Conan's capers abroad. Hilarious.

(Not bad for an American!)

[PannySVHS]

I love Conan, to me the champ of all latenighters. That guy has funny bones and of course a great and funny mind and a great team and sidekick. He is a cultural treasure beyond borders. I remember people who found him to be way too goofy for a relaxed watch and preferred Leno and Letterman, who both were more suited for a broad audience.

Conan got rejected when trying to enter a snobster techno club in Berlin about two or three years ago. I don't mention the name on purpose. Real Estate Pros love to grab Eastgerman trademarks and turn them into elitaer technodiscos. I imagine some technofollowers would disagree with the connotation of disco. So Conans little act gave me tears of joy and gratitude.

I enjoyed Kay on Digitalrev a big deal. It could have always been bigger, badder and better but it was the best available back then. What I came to not like were some gender based jokey remarks iirc. I enjoyed to "travel" Hong Kong as a youtube tourist, with Kay as a photo guide and camera talking guy. A Conan he is not indeed. But who is in the camera world. There is only one other guy i can watch as a whole for camera entertainment and that one is a funny grumpy polarbear in his rather blank living room. Hong Kong and guests and people of Hong Kong were exiting to wander and roam around.

[IronFilm]

Seems that this happened a month ago, there are a tonne of reddit threads about it:

Quote

"Some really nice guys here uploaded the entire content into internet archive!"

https://archive.org/search?query=title%3A(DigitalRev)

Quote

User kaimanwong said:

'Many people hate him?!' 🤣 Aw, man, is this you, Jared? 😆

I clicked in to their YT channel the other day to have a look and was shocked to see only 9 videos left - all the boring ones, too 😆 HDR photography and 360 video?! - and I was really gutted.

Honestly, I don't know why they removed all those videos, but I can definitely confirm it wasn't a case of me suing them!

All I can say is what I've briefly covered on Twitter-X-whatever-it-is-known-as; although I always appreciate DR for putting their faith in me at the beginning, the rot eventually started to set in. The success of the YT channel and the blogging platform became a vehicle for the-person-above-us' ego; I didn't think too much of it when they started doing photoshoots and interviews with newspapers about the channel, but I can see what went wrong looking back.

Also, whenever a staff writer left, they removed all credit from the articles that those writers had written and published online, which was seriously not cool. All of a sudden, these writers had no proof of their work to show any prospective employers. Staff were treated as a number and that included myself. I didn't feel that at first but I did towards the end.

So why did they delete all of those videos? I can't think of any other reason than ego. Keeping them online is a constant reminder of past glories that they couldn't achieve again by themselves.

EDIT: Oh, BTW, re: the NFT thing. I believe they tried selling content as NFT quite some time before they removed all the videos so I don't think that they are necessarily linked. I remember seeing them try to auction off those videos as NFTs and nobody bothered bidding.

Tony & Chelsea Northrup covered it:

Linus covered it as well: