HOLLYWOOD – Through entertaining reality and cooking shows, music videos and documentaries, the team behind the recently launched streamer UnchainedTV is striving to help audiences understand the benefits of going vegan, carefully walking the line between getting their point across (eating animals is bad for humans and bad for the planet) and keeping from driving non-vegans to turn it off.
UnchainedTV has a dedicated focus on teaching the world about veganism – but without making people feel like they are being lectured about it.
This mission is close to the heart of its founder Jane Velez-Mitchell (above), an award-winning journalist and author from the United States who went to NYU.
Just before she started working on UnchainedTV, she had a show called Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell (later just Jane Velez-Mitchell), which wrapped up in 2014. Her girlfriend at the time commented that Velez-Mitchell was now “unchained” because when she was a reporter, she was limited in what she could do despite being passionate about social issues.
“I had been in the mainstream media for decades, never being able to really attend a protest on my own because I went from contract to contract, so that’s when we came up with the idea of UnchainedTV,” Velez-Mitchell explained in an interview with Cartt.ca, adding the name of the streamer has many meanings including “unchain the animals” and “unchain your brain”.
UnchainedTV is a non-profit based in California. Velez-Mitchell does not take a salary and donates to the non-profit. The operation is mostly volunteer run, but they pay a few technical people and raise funds to advertise it, targeting those looking for free content.
“There’s only so much that people want to pay to watch TV, so this is completely free and… a good percentage of what we raise goes right into those ads to get those people around the world to download our app,” said Velez-Mitchell. (The app is available on a variety of devices including iPhones, Androids, Amazon Fire Sticks, with UnchainedTV also being available to watch free online.)
“We don’t ask for money, we don’t ask for your email, we don’t ask for your personal information. You literally go to your app store, put right in “UnchainedTV” and there it is,” the streamer’s founder said.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about UnchainedTV is that it is largely powered by the vegan community, relying heavily on content being submitted to them for free.
“What we are doing is using the ingenuity, creativity and passion of the global vegan community to send us videos, so in a way, we get all this billions of dollars of content for free because we’re all aligned by one thing, a passion to get the word out to non-vegans,” said Velez-Mitchell, adding that the streamer has hundreds of “lifechanging videos from award-winning documentaries like Earthlings, Dominion, Vegucated, Countdown to Year Zero, The Invisible Vegan, and then we have a lot of cooking shows, including our award-winning cooking show New Day New Chef.”
And they are getting new content sent in all the time.
“It is doing very well, and we are growing exponentially,” said Velez-Mitchell. (While their access to metrics is limited right now, they did pass a milestone of one million views last month.)
The streamer even has its own reality show called Pig Little Lies now, which tells the story of the rescue of two potbellied pigs from a high kill shelter. Velez-Mitchell had been thinking about putting together a reality series and got the idea for Pig Little Lies when she was on the phone with her friend, country singer and ex-reality TV star Simone Reyes, who at the time was in the middle of trying to save the pigs.
“And I said hold on a second, this is the reality show,” the UnchainedTV founder said.
So, they went with it and ended up with a reality series about two pigs named Dante and Beatrice who they refer to as husband and wife because they are a bonded pair.
The series is one big adventure.
“You can’t just walk out of a shelter with a potbellied pig – they’re like a 150 pounds – you have to provide transportation. It’s a very complicated thing,” Velez-Mitchell explained.
They ended up finding a wildlife rehabber who agreed to take the pigs in and put one in the laundry room and the other in the front yard. When they arrived, however, they discovered Beatrice was pregnant and would soon give birth to 13 piglets.
“The reality show just unfolded in front of our eyes… you couldn’t create this drama if you wanted to orchestrate it,” said Velez-Mitchell.
UnchainedTV’s target audience is very broad, with its founder describing it as “anyone who eats food”. She is however, also “very determined to get out of the vegan bubble,” she said. This was one of the drivers for putting together the entertaining reality show Pig Little Lies.
“Let’s not preach to the converted. Let’s get to those non-vegans who are suffering from all sorts of health ills, and who are looking for solutions, but they’re not getting it on mainstream television,” said Velez-Mitchell.
“I feel we owe it to animals, starving children and the planet to use every technology available to send out this crucial message that is being ignored by mainstream media, which has really aborgated its responsibility to its viewers.”
For the record, she is talking more so about mainstream media in the U.S. rather than in Canada.
As Cartt.ca reported earlier this year when the streamer was announced, Canada has had UnchainedTV’s top viewership.
“I think Canada is an incredible place and I think that UnchainedTV is going to do very well there because… just looking at the media in Canada, they discuss issues that are often ignored by American media, which is focused on, unfortunately, the latest breaking news, which is often a mass shooting or some other horror show,” Velez-Mitchell said, adding she believes “there is a more thoughtful and slightly more open media” here.
“I congratulate Canada for having the thoughtfulness and the courage to discuss some of these issues that don’t seem to make it into the mainstream media in the United States.”
Photo provided by Jane Velez-Mitchell.
