By Ian Hollidae, 2025/07/24

A recent Wall Street Journal article, How YouTube Won the Battle for TV, highlights how Hollywood is losing the battle against YouTube. The following sums things up:

For most of the past 20 years since it was founded, YouTube was an alternative to television, a home for cheap, low-quality ephemera like how-to videos and skateboard tricks that Hollywood worried was distracting people from real entertainment. YouTube started as a website to watch videos on PCs. It made its way onto televisions in 2010, but the interface was clunky. By the 2020s, a generation that grew up watching internet videos alone on their phones and tablets began watching YouTube together in their living rooms and with their own children.
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In the process, [YouTube] became a media juggernaut. MoffettNathanson analysts estimate YouTube’s revenue last year was $54.2 billion, which would make it No. 2 among entertainment companies, behind only Disney.

I could waste a lot of words on the disconnect between Hollywood and the so-called amateurs but what would be the point. Hollywood spent hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) trying to be the next Netflix. They spent practically nothing trying to meet the YouTube challenge. I'm guessing somewhere down the line, YouTube might just swallow Hollywood whole.

As for the average daily YouTube viewer, we just keep on watching.

Tags: Streaming