Audiences don't want more footage. They want in

When a fandom gets loud between releases, the industry has one instinct: give it more to watch. A teaser. A behind-the-scenes cut. A recap, a reaction, a first look at the first look. The logic is that attention is hunger for content, so you feed it more content.

That instinct is outdated. The audience is not asking to watch more. It is asking to engage more.

The generation that acts on stories

For most of broadcast history, a fan's only move was to consume and wait. You watched, you discussed, you waited for the next instalment. The relationship ran one way. That is not the fan who exists now. A generation raised on games, mods, fan fiction and creator culture does not receive a story, it acts on one. It builds inside it, argues with it, remixes it, extends it. Watching is the start of the relationship, not the whole of it.

The strategist Zoe Scaman has argued this shift for years: power has moved from the media empires to the fans, who now expect to build inside a world rather than watch it from outside (Bodacious).

This appetite is measurable. In Deloitte's Digital Media Trends 2024 (published October 2023), 70% of self-identified video game fans said they want their favourite franchise extended into film or television. Not more of the same game. More ways in. The figure for all gamers was lower, at 41%, and the distance between those two numbers is the real insight: the deeper the fandom, the stronger the pull to step further inside the world rather than watch it from outside.

Look again at the first Grand Theft Auto VI trailer in December 2023. The audience did not just watch the official asset, which drew more than 93 million views in a day. They responded to it, at more than double that volume, in reactions, breakdowns, theories and edits (YouTube Culture and Trends Fandom Report 2024). The fandom did not consume the trailer. It went to work on it.

The point is not that people watched a lot. They watched and participated.

Podcasts feed consumption but stop short of engagement

The smartest rights holders already feel this pull, and the companion podcast is their answer to it. The official after-show, the between-seasons rewatch, the cast commentary: these exist to give fans somewhere to go when the main feed falls quiet, and fans show up. That is the appetite, confirmed.

But listen to what a companion podcast actually is. It is one more thing to receive. You press play and it talks at you. It is broadcast wearing the costume of participation. It proves that fans want to stay in the world between releases, and in the same breath it proves how little has been built to let them actively participate.

The layer nobody has built

The in-between is not short of content. It is short of agency. Every franchise now has a continuous, active fandom and almost nothing for that fandom to do that it did not build for itself. The wikis, the theory threads, the fan edits: the audience is already constructing its own participatory layer, in public, for free, because the people who own the worlds have not given them one.

For a long time there was a fair excuse. Giving every fan a way to take part, at any hour, at the scale a modern fandom runs to, was ruinously expensive. That excuse has quietly expired. What would have been unaffordable a couple of years ago is now simply a thing nobody has built yet.

The next layer of entertainment will not be something you watch. It will be something you can enter, question and shape, inside the world you already love, in the long stretch when there is nothing official airing.

More footage gives a fandom something to watch. Participation gives it something to belong to.

Sotto · London · 15.07.26

First published on LBB Online.