After Half a Century on Television, the Academy Awards are Moving to YouTube

As TechCrunch recently reported, YouTube has won the rights to stream the Oscars, Hollywood’s glitziest awards ceremony, exclusively on its platform beginning in 2029. For these rights, the online platform outbid other prominent entities from both network television and digital streaming, including ABC, the Academy Awards’ historic home since 1961.

The initial streaming deal, signed between Google’s YouTube and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the “Academy”), will run until 2033. It will encompass not only the Oscars ceremony itself, but also all filming of the evening’s surrounding events, including “red carpet coverage, behind-the-scenes content, access to the Governors Ball, and more”, according to the Academy’s press release. The Academy touted its “holistic partnership” as making entertainment’s biggest night more accessible to a global audience, enabling billions of internet users outside the United States to watch the ceremony live and for free, accompanied by comprehension aides like closed captioning and language dubbing. For American viewers, the ceremony and associated content will be available for subscribers of YouTubeTV.

The departure of the Oscars – arguably the quintessential ‘made-for-TV’ event of the last century – from network television signifies another victory for internet-based streamers and social media platforms over erstwhile forms of entertainment, such as cable. That victory is unmistakably reflected in, and perpetuated by, the numbers. For instance, in 2025, a Nielsen report confirmed that Americans’ television viewership on streaming platforms, such as Netflix, Paramount+ and Hulu, had eclipsed the combined total viewership of cable and broadcast television for the first time. Similarly, whereas the 2025 broadcast of the Oscars drew roughly 19.7 million viewers across ABC and its associated channels (an uptick from the previous year), YouTube’s logged-in users totalled almost 2 billion this year, not including the millions who frequented the site without having signed into an account. In a sense, the Oscars itself has joined the myriad creatives, executives, tradespeople and performers that constitute its voting Academy, pivoting to the streamers in search of a larger and more engaged audience for its product.

Until 2029, ABC will continue to host the Academy Awards, meaning that the program’s final showing on network television will coincide with the ceremony’s 100^th anniversary, in 2028. Its 101^st occurrence the following year will be the first to air – or rather, stream – exclusively on YouTube.

Author: Sarah Farb, 2025-2026 Articling Student-At-Law