A decade old camera review channel on YouTube, DigitalRev, has removed hundreds of old videos from their channel. Only about 9 remain.
While I’m not a big camera guy, and wasn’t aware of this channel beforehand, I heard about this on Linus Tech Tips’ WAN Show - apparently the page was a trusted resource for a lot of people.
The good news is, it does appear to be mostly(?) archived via archive.org. Not sure why it was pulled from YouTube, so there is a risk it could be pulled from Archive as well - if anyone wants to backup, now might be a good time.
Heard about this last week, wouldn’t you (as a YT channel) want to leave those videos up and continue to collect the passive revenue? Unless they had some deal with Kai and Lok where they paid out to them so long as the videos remained online… I wonder if Kai will address it.
It was definitely still relevant to watch some of those older videos if you were shopping for a piece of used gear. Hopefully Digitalrev changes their minds and puts them back up!
I mean they did mostly reviews from what I remember. Most of the tech was outdated by today’s standards. Plus once the main two people left around 5-6 years ago the show went into tailspin.
Obsolete reviews for now obsolete products. There is similar abundant material all over the internet.
They were almost comedy. I sometimes rewatched it just for fun.
THIS. I don’t have time to watch probably 1-10% of the new stuff that might interest me, heck any time now I’ll give up and realise I won’t be able to make a dent in what I have ALREADY saved (I have in Pocket/readitlater many saves that are more than 5 years old, well probably more like 10-15, and there I need just to skim through an article and marked it read, and still I can’t just sit down every now and then and go through a few of them, even if they are all interesting).
Yes, the content was really good but there was some “business change” a while back. I’ve no idea how anyone would try to monetise in any other way these videos, I think it’s impossible.
The loss here is that when they were easily accessible and referenced by many people you find and revisit some funny thing, or small quirk, or something that stuck interesting that stuck in your mind and you could point people to them. But it really isn’t a big thing overall, except on ideological DHer principles.
Do we hoard for need? Or for glory?
That’s a shame. Kai is a legend. At least he still maintains his personal channel.
One of their presenters was extremely funny and the reviews were not “standard”. Often they got called the “top gear of cameras”.
Their videos lost would be a catastrophe. I rewatch some of their challenges just for fun. Or the old Pro Photographer cheap Camera series. Thats legendary.
Damn. Why did I never bother to download them.
I mean they still do their own thing on their own channels right now and upload frequently.
I agree about the Top Gear comparison. They were definitely entertaining.
I agree about their own channels. But this is r/datahoarder and not r/datalossmoveon.
Also the old stuff with the three together was much more entertaining.
Kai Wong, the main presenter still has a youtube channel that i watch from time to time. but i loved watching some old digitalrev videos from time to time, they were so fun! i bought my first canon DSLR because of them:)
i wish i had downloaded the videos as well
Download them now from Archive! There appear to be archives from 2007 to 2019!
I got into photography because of them as well. But the channel was already dead then. It’s not the reviews that hooked me but the fun they had and the inspiring creativity of the pro photographers.
Yup! Kai convinced me to buy a D3300 some ~10yr ago. Then I entered that rabbit hole …
This is the motivation I needed to finish a yt-dlp script that downloads my favourite channels.