30th Jan 2012

By The Latino Youtuber

As many of you will be aware, with the world becoming ever more global, cultural mixing has become quite the norm in many societies around the world. Latino-Anglo mixing, which we are all familiar with, could be said to be one of the most interesting cultural relationships in the world today. With Youtube being a site aimed at entertainment and expression for all kinds of people, I have always found it odd that there has been a distinct lack of channels and videos aimed at a bilingual and bicultural Latino-Anglo audience. That is, however, until my daily browsing uncovered TuTele.

TuTele and its sister channel TuTeleDos are extremely new to the Youtube circuit; starting up as official channels in November of last year. The channels are owned and operated by Maker Studios, a company established by some of Youtube’s finest content creators, and with the expertise of both English and Spanish speaking Youtube stars, these channels have so far been very successful in creating a variety of videos aimed at a bilingual audience that has long been forgotten on Youtube, but that makes up a large part of today’s society. With nearly 30,000 subscribers across the two channels, they may not be some of the most popular channels yet, but to have generated such a large amount of followers in only two months indicates that they are fast establishing themselves alongside already well-known channels.

The main channel is ingeniously organised by its videos. Contributors to the channel have come up with a small handful of video concepts and rather than making one-off video content, they take a series-type approach to their videos. Choosing programme genres which mirror those that you see on television, TuTele creates relatively short videos, normally no longer than ten minutes, which incorporate numerous bilingual themes.

Sí! Es I, Pepe is perhaps the most unusual series the channel has to offer. The series tells the story of a corn seller named Pepe whose spirit is trapped into the van that hit and killed him. Pepe and his friends join forces in order to stop the gangster, to whom the van belonged, offering audiences a truly unique and funny concept for a short bilingual series.

Melodia de Amor is perhaps my favourite video series belonging to TuTele. Taking a quintessentially Latin concept, TuTele has developed a telenovela-style series with a typically telenovela title. The series follows the lives of a string of characters, all connected to each other by Rocio del Carmen and her search for love. Split into ten episodes in total, these videos truly succeed as bilingual content with a bilingual script and a mix of Latin and American Youtube actors taking on the roles.

Hello Domingote is the final series the channel posts. As you may have guessed, every Sunday presenter Lourdes Narro talks audiences through the latest Hollywood news and interviews in Spanish, of course. This series proves extremely attractive to those who are familiar with American news and culture, but speak Spanish as their first language.

If all of that wasn’t enough for you, TuTeleDos acts as the perfect TuTele companion, presenting audiences with extra “behind the scenes” videos linked to those from the main channel.

So what does this avid Youtube fan think of this channel? I can honestly say that this channel is probably the most interesting, entertaining and revolutionary channel I’ve come across in a while. The bilingual approach adorns this channel with the truly unique ability of accurately representing and creating content for a thoroughly modern and growing proportion of society.