You fire up YouTube on a Friday night. You scroll. You watch three minutes of something forgettable. You scroll more. You end up watching a stranger’s home renovation for 45 minutes, and you cannot explain why.
Here’s what I want to show you instead. YouTube is hiding entire worlds of genuinely great content that the algorithm never surfaces unless you know where to look. Millions of people have already found these channels. Tonight, you can, too.
📺 The live ones you can’t look away from
Airline Videos Live is a 24/7 livestream of planes arriving and departing at LAX. That’s it. Kevin Ray, a former news photographer, points cameras at the runway, pipes in live air traffic control audio and narrates the whole thing like it’s Monday Night Football. The channel has more than 850,000 subscribers. Put it on your TV and tell me you don’t watch for an hour.
If you want more drama, find Big Jet TV. Jerry Dyer livestreams from a van roof outside London’s Heathrow Airport. During Storm Eunice, over 200,000 people tuned in simultaneously to watch planes wrestling with 122 mph winds, as Dyer cheered every white-knuckle landing like it was the World Cup. The archived video has over 7.5 million views. The channel has nearly half a million subscribers.
Jelle’s Marble Runs has 1.46 million subscribers and 206 million total views for one reason: marble racing. Jelle Bakker built elaborate tracks, named the marbles, invented teams and rivalries and hired a sports commentator to call the races. Watch five minutes. You will have a favorite team.
😌 The ones that turn your brain off (in a good way)
Oddly Satisfying has over 4.3 million subscribers and over 2.29 billion views of kinetic sand being sliced, soap being carved and pressure washers blasting years of grime off driveways. There’s actual neuroscience behind why this is relaxing. Your brain interprets these videos as tasks being completed perfectly, and it rewards you with a small hit of dopamine every single time.
Then there’s NRK, Norway’s public broadcaster. It aired an uninterrupted train ride almost 10 hours long through the countryside. The full journey is on YouTube. Mountains, tunnels, snow and the rhythmic sound of the rails. Millions of views. Perfect for background noise, napping or staring at something beautiful when the news gets to be too much.
It’s a big internet. These are five very good corners of it. Have a channel you like? Let me know when you rate this newsletter at the end. Maybe I’ll feature it in an upcoming newsletter.
📩 Send this to someone who says they can never find anything good to watch on a Friday night. Use the handy links below.