Comedy giant Walter Latham on why YouTube is the future
Walter Latham, the creator of the film “The Original Kings of Comedy,” is taking his business to YouTube. With his Latham Entertainment YouTube channel, Latham is one of four African Americans to partner with the online video company to bring urban entertainment to the Internet.
Latham says YouTube is one of the best ways for him to launch his comedic brand into the next generation. “It’s a different era that we’re in. Everyone is going to the Internet. And for me, it’s great — in the industry that I’m in, whether it’s television or film, you have to convince another person that what you’re trying to do makes sense. Whereas on YouTube, I just do whatever I want to do.”
He says he hopes to surpass Black Entertainment Television as the biggest supplier of urban media. “The realistic ambition is that cable’s going to go away. And you know, we are here now in the early stages of what cable was probably 30 years ago. And BET, although they had their shot, I think they could have done better — we’re going to do better. And in 30 years from now, we will be looked at as the better version of BET, but on the Internet as opposed to cable.”
And Latham says he expects to continue running the channel from his home in North Carolina, even if it may be far from an entertainment capital. “The cool thing about this is as long as you have your content on a hard drive, and you have a really cool computer with really fast Internet access, you can run it from anywhere in the world.”
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