AVbyte

Submission 5,166

About

AVbyte is a YouTube channel featuring a series of short musical productions that are inspired by a wide range of popular media franchises and social media trends.

Online History

The AVbyte YouTube channel^[1] was launched by New York film students and brothers Antonius and Vijay Nazareth on January 3rd, 2012, with the mini musical titled “MURDERING MUSICAL MADNESS!! | Hot Girl Experiences Sudden Death (Scarface Style).” As of April 2014, this video has gained over 69,000 views.

On July 27th, 2012, another popular YouTube sibling duo Vlogbrothers uploaded a musical episode titled “Tumblr: The Musical,” which was produced in collaboration with AVbyte. According to Antanius Nazareth, the collaboration became the duo's viral breakout and brought a massive jump in subscribers for the channel. As of April 2014, the video has gained over 1.8 million views.

On October 1st, 2012, they uploaded a video titled "Hipster Disney Princess-The Musical," which quickly became one of their most popular videos, gaining over 14 million views as of April 2014. The video was covered by many sites including The Huffington Post^[7], Mashable^[8] and The Mary Sue.^[9]

In February 2013, the channel was selected to be a part of YouTube's Next Up program^[5], which provides up and coming YouTubers with support and guidance in building their channel and their audience.

As of April 2014, the most popular AVbyte video is titled "A Musical feat. Disney Princesses," which was uploaded on February 11th, 2014. As of April 2014, the video has gained over 20.1 million views.

In addition to their musicals, their channel also features behind the scenes videos (below, left) that documents the production of their musicals and comments videos (below, right) in which the brothers read comments from YouTube and Twitter from their most recent musical.

Reputation

As of April 2014, AVbyte's YouTube channel has over 500,000 subscribers. Its official Facebook page^[2] has gained over 21,000 likes and its Twitter account^[3] has over 8,000 followers.

Personal Life

Antonius and Vijay Nazareth were born in Verona, Italy to two classical musicians.^[10]Antonius began college at 13^[4], earning a bachelors degree in music from a school in Germany. He attended NYU for one semester in 2011. Vijay attended New York's City College.