Oscar Telecast Heads To YouTube In 2029, Leaving Broadcast Behind

Ooof, it’s been a difficult season for Hollywood traditionalists: one of its most revered studios may be bought by Netflix; beloved Disney characters are headed to OpenAI’s controversial Sora AI video app; and now, the Oscars will be available only through Alphabet-owned YouTube and YouTube TV beginning in 2029.

That latter announcement arrived today from the Motion Picture Academy, stunning news for an already battered Hollywood community that has seen production flee Los Angeles and technology turn long-held business practices and relationships upside down.

“We are thrilled to enter into a multifaceted global partnership with YouTube to be the future home of the Oscars and our year-round Academy programming,” Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Academy president Lynette Howell Taylor said in a joint statement.

The annual show, held these days in early March, will continue on Disney-owned ABC for the next three years before the show shifts to Alphabet-owned YouTube and its virtual MVPD corporate cousin, YouTube TV.

The move is particularly notable given that the Academy is one of Hollywood’s sturdiest redoubts of traditionalist thinking. Many of the 10,000 or so Academy members, who vote on the Oscars, have loudly voiced their concerns about the impacts of online video streaming, especially Netflix’s institutional indifference to theatrical releases for most of its films before they are released online.

That’s believed to have encumbered Netflix’s many Oscar campaigns in recent years, despite contender slates that typically include half a dozen or more critically well received projects.

Academy member attitudes might be even more snooty toward YouTube’s endless phalanxes of creators, long dismissed as the home of surfing squirrels and the like, but now the place where many serious young creators are finding ardent audiences for a wide array of shows. YouTube also generated an estimated $36.1 billion in ad revenue last year (before sharing some revenue with its biggest creators).

Meanwhile, viewership on broadcast has been declining in general for years, and not just for the Oscars, which remain one of the most-watched non-football programs of the year. It’s a live, unpredictable event at that, which means it attracts lots of high-end advertisers trying to attach their brands to the fashion, glamor and cultural oomph of the Oscars.

But the Oscar telecasts have never fully recovered since the pandemic, which locked down Hollywood about a month after Bong Joon Ho’s satire Parasite won the 2020 Best Picture award.

The ceremony scheduled for early March this year came closest to recovering its audience fully, ending up a little short of 20 million viewers. The Golden Globes, which traditionally open the awards season, drew around half that last January as it scrabbled back from scandal, boycotts, a temporary shutdown, reorganization, and ownership change.

The move to YouTube for Oscar may represent an initial drop in direct U.S. reach compared to a typical broadcast audience in this era, though that may not be the case by 2029. Already, various estimates place YouTube’s monthly active user base at 2.5 billion and 2.7 billion, which absolutely includes tens of millions of U.S. viewers, many of whom already routinely watch YouTube program on their biggest and best home screens.

Furthermore, YouTube’s global presence matches well with the more international focus and aspirations of the Academy these days. Foreign-born filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho and Guillermo del Toro have won Best Picture Oscars, and Hollywood films themselves routinely feature international locations, stars, crews and audiences.

Being able to reach the international audiences for those is increasingly important if the academy is to retain its august position as the most prestigious of filmmaking awards. YouTube’s global reach will also be important for the Academy’s year-round film-related programs and content.

The Academy itself also has far more international members than it once did, expanding by about 40 percent since the “Oscars So White” protests before the pandemic, with a more diverse, international and younger influx of members.

YouTube TV, meanwhile, is the biggest of the virtual MVPDs, online-only versions of the cable bundles that long ruled television.

YouTube TV has around 10 million subscribers, and announced earlier this month that it would begin offering a variety of smaller, cheaper themed bundles of channels. That approach is designed to blunt complaints that YouTube TV has gotten too expensive (it’s now around $83 a month, after starting at about half that price).