The sports category has moved to a new website.

Lights! Camera! Focus on the watch action!

On the Hodinkee YouTube channel, for example, total video plays increased from nearly 3 million in 2015 to more than 7.6 million in 2017.

On the Hodinkee YouTube channel, for example, total video plays increased from nearly 3 million in 2015 to more than 7.6 million in 2017. WatchBox Studios, a video operation founded by the Philadelphia-based watch retailer Govberg, boasts even more impressive statistics: Combined views for the company’s three YouTube channels now average 1.1 million per month, according to the owner, Danny Govberg.

The growth mirrors what is happening in the wider world, with technology specialists describing a post-text future in which audio and video dominate. “The younger consumer is looking for motion,” said David Bates, managing director of ATK PLN, a Dallas-based video content agency. “They expect it.”

And just like the entertainment industry — where content from traditional movie studios and TV networks is being outpaced by the likes of Netflix and Amazon Studios — the expensive productions offered by many of Switzerland’s biggest brands have largely failed to find audiences.

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For example: Hublot’s YouTube channel has more than 20,000 subscribers and a recent Floyd Mayweather piece drew almost 7,500 views, but many of its videos have fewer than 500 views. And a recent Girard-Perregaux video, a computer-generated look inside a timepiece that’s similar to many other brand videos online, has not reached 600 views.

Widely considered the watch trade’s most influential website, Hodinkee earned that reputation in part through its commitment to creating professional video content with a cinematic bent. “Anything from three-minute service journalism pieces to the more in-depth ‘Talking Watches’ episodes, where there’s more personality, more story and often a celebrity attached,” said Will Holloway, Hodinkee’s director of content and senior digital producer.

Holloway met Benjamin Clymer, the site’s founder, in 2010 while they were both students at Columbia University’s journalism program; three years later, he became the site’s third employee. Over the past year, Holloway, who had long operated as a one-man band, hired two associate producers.

In 2017, Holloway said, the operation created a record 62 videos, including live broadcasts; previously it had averaged about 30 a year. But its most popular video, with 1.3 million views, remains the first “Talking Watches” episode, a nine-minute clip from 2013 featuring John Mayer riffing on his favorite timepieces, Rolex chief among them (“A GMT is one of the world’s greatest apps,” the singer-songwriter said).

“This is escapism,” Holloway said. “Get away from the drudgery of the daily news cycle and be immersed in something, and if you say ‘Oh, wow’ a couple times, we’re doing a pretty good job.”

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TheWatches.tv founder Marc André Deschoux was running an audiovisual production company in Geneva when he noticed the films that watch companies had him producing were languishing in cyberspace.

“They would cost hundreds of thousands of Swiss francs and I thought, ‘Who is looking at these videos?'” Deschoux said. “What was put into productions was disproportionate to their visibility.”

In 2011, he introduced the website TheWatches.tv to show “the industry with a bit less ceremonial approach,” he said. But it took a couple years for the site to gain traction outside of watch-centric Geneva— in part, he said, because the chief executives he used on-camera in his early videos “were not very good at communicating.”

That realization prompted Deschoux himself to step in front of the camera. Wearing his trademark thick-rimmed spectacles, he approaches the watch business — whether it’s a four-minute interview with a collector at SIHH or a 19-minute clip highlighting the history of Patek Philippe — as an exuberant neophyte.

“There are enough forums and websites with a geeky approach,” he said. “We don’t go too much into the details. The bench mark I use: If my mom understands my videos, then I’m fine.”

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In February 2016, Govberg left a meeting with a creative agency in Miami with one takeaway: “It’s all about video,” he said.

Two years and $600,000 later, six sales associates-cum-broadcast journalists now work in the sophisticated in-house studio installed above his central Philadelphia store. Govberg describes the video production team, WatchBox Studios, as “the CNBC of watches” — and an important part of the WatchBox website that Govberg and his partners introduced in 2017 to change online sales of pre-owned luxury watches.

The Govberg/WatchBox team produces about 50 reviews and six shows for its three YouTube channels every week (offerings include “Watch Science” and “Watch Girls A–Z”). The company also is gearing up to produce a WatchBox Live channel, where viewers can buy timepieces, as well as a dedicated IP channel for smart-TV viewers.

Since the first channel went live five years ago, the shows have generated more than 20 million views, 12 million of them in the past 12 months, according to Govberg.

One of WatchBox Studios’ best-known assets is Tim Mosso, a former U.S. Navy press officer-turned-watch expert, who delivers earnest, hands-on, sales-driven reviews of new products in his “This Week in Watches” show.

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“In retail, nobody is doing what we’re doing,” Govberg said. “Our shows help educate. But the most important factor: They also entertain.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

VICTORIA GOMELSKY © 2018 The New York Times

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