Cozy content ate the YouTube Yule log video

Reflecting on ≈60 years of ambient fireplace footage

Note: I first published this post in December 2020, at the height of Covid’s so-called “second wave.” At the time, I observed — correctly, I think?! — that ambient fireplace videos had lately become a sort of pandemic-era, online therapy. Since then, the genre has only grown more popular: YouTube searches for fireplace videos spiked to new highs in each of the past four Decembers. In other words, the world opened back up again … but people continue to romanticize these pristine, domestic and deeply lonely dioramas.

Why is that? I remembered the question a few weeks ago, when The New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka — also referenced in this original post (!) — published an essay on “cozy content.” Cozy content is an amorphous, soft-lit, know-it-when-you-see-it genre, and fireplace videos largely fit the bill. They glamorize solitude and loneliness. They serve dual aesthetic and therapeutic purposes. And they’ve lasted well beyond the crisis that made them popular, in part perhaps because the world does not lack for crisis. Cozy content, Chayka writes, “preserve[s] some of the housebound, self-cosseted mood of quarantine for a world now buffeted by economic instability, international conflict, and political upheaval.” In the process, however … cozy content ate the YouTube Yule log video.

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I assumed the YouTube fireplace started on YouTube, but its origins actually stretch back into the predigital past. Some 58 years ago — in 1966 — a local TV news station shot 17 seconds of hygge porn on 16mm film and looped the footage into a long, ambient broadcast.

The idea was novel for its time. (For years, a devoted fan base sleuthed out and lambasted imitators.) Now fireplace videos — and ambient YouTube, generally — are jam-packed niches vying to soundtrack our respective pandemic prisons from any available second monitor or smart TV. YouTube searches for fireplace videos spike every December, according to Google. But they’re headed for a new high this year, exceeding even the fireplace-crazed winter of 2015. (And that one I put down solely to this Nick Offerman video.)

Anyway, there are now ambient fireplace videos with snow and rain and howling storms and kittens and puppies and … Florida tourism. There are fantastical animated fireplaces, the details lavish and fairytale-esque. There are long loops of fireplaces in penthouses and luxury ski chalets, the captions promising not just “something a little different and special” — as the OG Yule Log creator did in 1966 — but “relaxation” and “stress relief” and “deep focus.” Ditto a growing bench of ambient, environmental YouTube videos, designed to mimic the look and sound of a crowded coffee shop or moving train or oceanfront pool. One of my favorite channels, called Calmed by Nature, grew from roughly 100,000 to 1.8 million weekly views in the past year alone.

In my mind, this genre is distinct from what Kyle Chayka recently called ambient TV, pointing to the likes of “Emily in Paris,” and maybe closer to the world of first-person, ambient walking videos that Aaron Gilbreath wrote about at the start of the pandemic. But even those feel a little more active, a little more ambitious.

In the walking videos, an unseen, unspeaking cameraman meanders around a foreign city, showing you what he sees through the lens. In place of plot or other conventional narrative tools, Gilbreath wrote, these videos offer “passive entertainment to distract and soothe”; they promise “atmosphere” and “discovery” and “movement.”

Fireplace videos also promise solace and distraction, but they veer a little more melancholic, I think: There’s a lot of longing looped up in these imagined holiday dioramas, where the Christmas lights are always on and the snow is always falling softly.

No wonder searches are up in 2020. [And, addendum from the future: In 2024.] Never have we so badly needed a dual hit of both “relaxation/stress relief” and “something a little different and special.”