One of the longest established series of all time is Saturday Night Live. It provides a place for young up and coming comedians and actors to establish their position in the world. The sketch show which is roughly an hour long usually has a celebrity special guest, musical guest and a roster of featured players and repertory members. The show is broken down into sketches usually depicting world events from that week. 2 musicical segments and in the middle a news anchor panel running through the headlines in the weekly ‘weekend update’.
Up until this year a wide selection of Saturday Night Live has been available across multiple regions on Netflix but without notice their contracts expired and we no longer got to see the previous few seasons as well as the specials which includes best ofs. We had a bit of a look around to see why, after all lots of other NBC series are still present to this day on Netflix.
We ultimate came down to the conclusion that NBC’s new online direction with the series is to use popular video streaming service YouTube to deliver the content. Because of the way the show works, often relying on weekly events the videos have more chance of going viral on the YouTube platform which then means more people view those videos which equals much more money than Netflix was planning to offer. It also means that you can pick individual sketches rather than having to go say 20 minutes into an episode.
This new direction is one that makes perfect sense but why they felt to remove the best of episodes which were doing relatively well in Netflix is yet to be seen. You can watch tons of sketches on the YouTube channel now with lots more added freely everyday.
