Skip to main content

Unspeakable talks YouTube and tech at CES 2021

YouTuber Unspeakable has turned his hobby of Minecraft into a veritable empire, with over 65 million views per month. Andre Stone and Ariana Escalante spoke with him from the Digital Trends CES Experience Center as part of our ongoing coverage of CES 2021.

Unspeakable is more than just Minecraft — for instance, recently he found himself doing a video about staying in a hotel room that costs over a quarter-million dollars. Where do those ideas come from? “A lot of those ideas float naturally through my brain,” he says. Many of his ideas stem from when he was a child. “I would build a Lego house [as a kid],” he says. “But now I’m a YouTuber and anything is possible, so I built a real, life-sized Lego house. I’m taking all the things I wanted to do as a child and blowing them into massive proportion.” And what can you do to beat that? “We have a list that is literally seven pages long,” he says. “Some of them as ridiculous as me buying a submarine and staying in it for 24 hours.”

Speaking about his own favorite tech, Unspeakable says the technology he can’t live without is his iPhone. “It’s with me all day…I use it to take notes…literally my phone is everything!”

As for his channel, he’s beyond using a smartphone to film his content. “We film almost all our videos on high-end cameras,” he says. “We use the new Sony cameras that just came out. We used a Canon when we first started, but I’ve fallen in love [with the Sony].”

Unspeakable then gives his vote for what will be the biggest video game of 2021. “It’s kind of hard to call,” he says. “But I feel like it’s going to be somewhere in the virtual reality space. That industry is growing so rapidly. We’re starting to see virtual reality stations in bowling alleys and public spaces. I think the future is in virtual reality.”

Personally, Unspeakable is interested in electric vehicles. “I’m really excited to see what all these big brands like Ford and Honda are coming out with. I’d also love to see more voice recognition software. I think the future is, ‘Alexa, make me a sandwich. Alexa, do this or do that. I think we’re going to see that integrated into homes much more than what we have now.”

Topics
Todd Werkhoven
Todd Werkhoven's work can be read at numerous publications and he co-authored a personal finance book called "Zombie…
Google and Roku strike a deal to keep YouTube and YouTube TV on the platform
YouTube on Roku.

Google and Roku today announced that the two companies have reached a deal that will keep YouTube and YouTube TV on the No. 1 streaming platform in the United States and return the YouTube TV channel to the Roku Channel Store. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but it's good for multiple years.

Roku's Dallas Lawrence, head of comms for platform business, told Digital Trends via email: "Roku and Google have agreed to a multiyear extension for both YouTube and YouTube TV.  This agreement represents a positive development for our shared customers, making both YouTube and YouTube TV available for all streamers on the Roku platform."

Read more
YouTube TV offering up a number of add-ons for $1 for 2 months
YouTube TV add-ons.

Turn on YouTube TV+ today and you'll find yourself with a pretty decent deal awaiting you. A number of add-ons are currently available for $1 a month for the next two months before they revert to their usual price.

The deal is good on some 22 add-on channels, from ALLBLK and AMC+ to Up Faith & Family and WEtv+.  The full price varies depending on the service -- Cinemax is the highest at $10 a month, and Law & Crime the lowest at $2 a month.

Read more
YouTube hides dislike button count, drawing criticism from users and creators
Youtube video on mobile. Credits: YouTube official.

YouTube is currently the second-most-used platform in the world, and it has introduced a number of beneficial updates recently, such as offering translation options in the comments section of a YouTube video and introducing a "Media Literacy" campaign that empowers users to prevent misinformation. However, a recent update that hides the dislike button count has not gone down well with the creative community.

An announcement on the official YouTube blog has revealed the company would be making dislike counts private across its platform. While the creators will be able to see dislike counts, users will not. YouTube's justification for this is that it's seeking to reduce harassment of content creators, irrespective of their reach. YouTube revealed that it conducted an experiment earlier this year where the dislike button was available to viewers, but the dislike count was hidden. Because the count was hidden, it found that viewers or commenters were less likely to leave a dislike and engage in targeted harassment, which tends to occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels.

Read more