Because we can't look away.

TGR posted the clip of McIntosh’s fall on YouTube in early November with the title “Skier Miraculously Survives 1,600 Foot Fall,” and it immediately went viral. McIntosh was invited to appear on Good Morning America, Fox Sports, and other news programs around the country to talk about the fall. The video has since racked up over 2.5 million views, more than ten times the number of views of the average TGR segment. “I actually stomp stuff a lot,” McIntosh told Outside shortly after the video went up. “It’s entertaining to watch that, too. It doesn’t have to be catastrophic falls only.”

Crash segments and blooper reels have been a part of ski movies since day one. But now, Jones says, production companies like his are much better at recognizing the value of that content and getting it out into the world in a more mainstream way than ever before. “We’ve always released clips like this.” Jones says. “But the shift, in the last two years specifically, is that we’ve gotten really sophisticated at media distribution. There’s so much gold in all this content we acquire. So a lot of what we’re doing is looking at our content and saying, ‘What has appeal? What has a story behind it that people are going to want to get behind?’”