When [Charlie] Phillips started Guardian Documentaries in 2015, he produced a video saying he was looking for “very contemporary” stories told in “up to 15 minutes”, which he described as “people’s attention span online”. He has now revised that range to 15-30 minutes.
This move towards longer-form video mirrors what some other news publishers are doing on Facebook Watch and YouTube, but Phillips says it is wrong to assume that Guardian Documentaries are viewed on phones. “More people are watching things on mobile [but] I also think more people are watching stuff through smart TVs and Playstation; more people are hooking up their laptop to a projector in their living room,” he says. “You have this move towards people watching more on bigger screens and making that distinction between your phone, where you might watch two or three minutes, and your bigger screen, which could be a desktop computer, where you might make an appointment to view slightly longer pieces.”
Read the full piece at The Drum
