It was only a matter of time before something like this happened – The Emmy Awards have officially expanded their short-form category to include consideration from the likes of YouTube Red, Maker Studios, and Adult Swim.
Unfortunately, your favourite Let’s Players aren’t very likely to take home an Emmy any time soon, but it does mean that the likes of PewDiePie (who recently released his first YouTube Red show, Scare PewDiePie) could nab the award this year.
Sadly, even if they happen to be insanely popular with millions of subscribers and viewers under their belts, a lot of big name YouTube creators are still looked down on by much of the traditional media for some reason. Here’s hoping this is the beginning of a beautiful shift in perception.
TV Academy chairman and CEO Bruce Rosenblum said:
Our industry is aggressively, quickly and creatively evolving the various ways episodic stories are told. These category changes reflect the broader opportunities that emerging networks and distribution platforms, such as Maker Studios, Fullscreen, Crackle, AwesomenessTV, YouTube Red, Adult Swim and others, are seizing in choosing innovative formats that enable our television community to share stories in novel and entertaining ways.
The short-form category is classed as a show consisting of at least six episodes, with installments running at 15 minutes or less, and distributed over the air and/or through cable, satellite, or the Internet.
The winners for the new category won’t be actually be announced during the main televised Emmys broadcast. Instead, it’ll be during a separate Creative Arts ceremony. Not a complete mainstream takeover just yet then, but an Emmy is an Emmy all the same.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.