For the first time ever, the Oscars will leave broadcast TV. Starting in 2029, the biggest non-sports cultural TV event of the year will be exclusively shown on YouTube.
YouTube took a big step towards big-event live programming when it aired an NFL game in Week 1 of this season, a Chargers win over the Chiefs in Brazil that drew 18.5 million viewers, per YouTube and Nielsen’s custom measurement. That was just a bit smaller than the audience the 2025 Oscars drew on ABC, a number that was down 14 million viewers from a decade ago.(The Athletic’s Jourdan Rodrigue looked into YouTube’s NFL aspirations.)
Meanwhile, YouTube is — by far — the most-watched platform in the U.S. Per Nielsen’s latest “Gauge” metrics, YouTube accounted for 12.9 percent of all TV and streaming consumption in November 2025. That’s:
• More than half of all broadcast TV viewing combined
• Nearly two-thirds of all cable TV viewing combined
• 50 percent more than Netflix
• More than the combination of NBC’s Peacock, Paramount+, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+
The Athletic’s Dan Shanoff and Andrew Marchand talked about the implications of the deal and what might come next for YouTube and sports.
Dan Shanoff: When the news of this deal came out, I immediately sent you a message: “True or false: If the Oscars rights can be sold to YouTube, the Super Bowl rights can be sold to YouTube,” and you wrote back “True.” Why do you think so?
Andrew Marchand: I recently spoke to Hans Schroeder, the executive vice president of media distribution for the NFL, about the idea of YouTube, Netflix or Amazon Prime Video picking up a Super Bowl in the next decade.
It does seem like a realistic possibility, as Schroeder said the NFL already feels confident in the streamers in handling 120 million-plus viewers on their service and the level of production.
The NFL has opt-outs in all of its current contracts at the end of the decade. Prime Video, with its success on “Thursday Night Football,” probably has the inside track, but YouTube or Netflix are definite contenders.
How would that work? When can the NFL test the market for how much YouTube (or Netflix or Amazon Prime Video) would pay for the first-ever streaming Super Bowl?
The NFL loves its traditional partners (NBC, Fox, CBS and ESPN/ABC) so my best guess is that they still have the majority of the Super Bowls in the next go-around. Maybe all of them.
However, money talks, and the Big 3 of YouTube, Netflix and Amazon are trillion-dollar companies with big ambitions. YouTube has the advantage of already not having a paywall. I would imagine a Prime Video or Netflix Super Bowl would probably put the Super Bowl in front of the subscription wall. That is my projection, not something Schroeder told me.
What, if anything, did YouTube learn from its experiment with huge live-event coverage last September with the NFL that might have informed their ambitions to acquire the Oscars?
I’m not sure if one had anything to do with the other. But it is a huge competition with Netflix and Prime Video for supremacy. Younger folks for certain and a lot of older people already incessantly turn to YouTube.
With the NFL, you aren’t going to start with the Super Bowl, so this season was a first step and the Brazil game, the second of the year, featuring Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs, was about as big as you can begin.
The amount of people that watched (nearly 20 million) wasn’t that great, but I’m not sure that was the platform as opposed to the Friday night game maybe not being a normal NFL window.
The Oscars are so culturally iconic. This feels like an “everything changes” moment, not unlike when upstart Fox acquired the rights to the NFL in 1994. Am I overreacting?
Digital is taking over the world. The traditional players still have their place, and will continue. But YouTube and company are examining what works and where they should be going. The Oscars are going to take the money and can easily rationalize that is where the eyeballs are. If the NFL did the same thing one day, it could have the same thought process.
