"Steve, why did you stop producing full length video reviews?"

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Something of a Frequently Asked Question around these parts!

This is mostly explained in the last full length video I did, Phones Show 436 embedded in https://stevelitchfield.com/sshow/index.html - in short, my life, and the world around me, had changed. A lot.

But I did want to amplify my reasons from a Creator standpoint. Back in 2006 (pre-YouTube) I was the only person in the world reviewing phones in video form. As YouTube started to take off and as smartphones became sexier, especially in the USA, as the iPhone rose and rose, the number of people attempting to review phones grew almost exponentially. 
  • Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) started as a school kid in 2008 but it was in 2012 that he started to cover phone tech seriously. 
  • Michael Fisher (Mr Mobile) started reviewing phones on YouTube in 2016. 
  • Lewis Hilsenteger (Unbox Therapy) started unboxing phones in 2011. 
  • Dave Lee (Dave2D) started up in 2015.
  • Arun Maini (MrWhosetheboss) started up (again as a kid!) in 2011.
You get the idea. The floodgates opened from 2012 onwards and a decade later, in 2023, there are hundreds - no, thousands - of phone-centric YouTube tech channels. 

My template was always to provide actual opinions and not just specs, and thankfully the majority of other creators followed suit - to this day I point anyone wanting balanced reviews towards the likes of Marques and Michael.

Which means that unless my opinions on a particular smartphone or feature or platform are markedly different than any of the thousands of others who review phones nowadays then there's little point in me putting in up to a dozen man hours per video to produce something that's a drop in the 2023 YouTube ocean.

Not that I don't have strong opinions sometimes. And not that I don't want to cover significant and interesting devices. Which is where YouTube Shorts come in. Take off my Phones Show identifier and I have 58 seconds maximum to get something over. Which turns out to be just right for insights and pointed opinions, shot on the phone (as always, in my case), but in this case unedited (apart from trimming) and uploaded directly. 


Each Short takes me between 30 minutes and an hour to put together, taking into account gathering up any resources, writing a basic script, setting up the tripod(!), filming, trimming and uploading, all in the YouTube app's Shorts interface.

So, in a busy family environment, with ever increasing responsibilities (seemingly), these Shorts allow me to still create and share my tech opinions without taking over a day or two of my life per upload.

It helps my justify my decision to go down this route that most others haven't followed suit - reviewing phones in particular so obviously needs a ten minute video rather than a 58 second one that no one other than me has actually tried. Yes, I'm breaking up content into bite-sized chunks and that's not as seamless for the viewer, I'll grant that. But I'm viewing it as a challenge and it's fun to think that I'm potentially innovating in this busy tech area.

Comments welcome, as always, either here or on MeWe.

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