The Oscars Are Headed to YouTube: What Hollywood's Biggest Pivot Means for the Future of Live Events
- Sahndra Fon Dufe
- Dec 23, 2025
- 6 min read
In a seismic shift for entertainment's most prestigious night, the Academy Awards will abandon traditional broadcast television for streaming, a move that signals a new era for live cultural events starting 2029.
The End of an Era
For more than half a century, the Oscars were synonymous with broadcast television in the United States. Beginning with the Academy's 101st ceremony in 2029, that relationship will come to an end. The show will livestream globally and exclusively on YouTube under a multi-year deal running through 2033, with YouTube outbidding other contenders, including ABC, the Oscars' longtime home since 1961 (except for a brief period in the early 1970s).
The upcoming 100th ceremony in 2028 will mark ABC's final broadcast of the awards, closing the curtain on Disney's decades-long stewardship of Hollywood's biggest night.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but industry insiders suggest that the amount YouTube was willing to pay didn't make sense for Disney, which has faced persistent challenges with the types of films that typically win Oscars and the show's declining viewership numbers.
Why This Shift Matters
This isn't simply a platform change. It represents a fundamental reimagining of how the world's most prestigious film awards reach audiences.
Global Reach at Unprecedented Scale: YouTube boasts more than 2 billion users worldwide, and streaming the ceremony free globally could open access far beyond traditional TV audiences. The platform will offer features such as closed captioning and audio tracks in multiple languages, making the Oscars more accessible to international viewers than ever before.
Changing Viewership Habits: Even the infamous incident of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in 2022 only boosted the show to an average 16.6 million viewers: the second-lowest yearly tally ever after the COVID-impacted 2021 Oscars. Traditional TV ratings for awards shows have declined precipitously over the past two decades, as audiences increasingly expect events to be accessible online and on mobile devices.
Creative Freedom: Perhaps most significantly, the move to YouTube gives the Academy unprecedented control over the ceremony's production. It's not a secret that the Academy and Disney/ABC would occasionally have disagreements over the best path for the Oscars, including the show's length, which awards to present, and who should host. Now, without network time constraints, the Oscars can run as long as the Academy deems appropriate.
Year-Round Content Ecosystem: Beyond the main event, YouTube will host red carpet coverage, behind-the-scenes features, nomination announcements, the Governors Awards, the Scientific and Technical Awards, and other Academy programming, effectively transforming the Oscars from a single-night event into a year-round digital platform
The Host Question
The 2029 ceremony's host has not yet been announced, but the position remains one of entertainment's most prestigious and challenging assignments.
The role has been filled by legendary performers ranging from Bob Hope, who hosted or co-hosted the ceremony a remarkable 19 times between 1940 and 1978, to Billy Crystal (nine times), Johnny Carson (five times), and Whoopi Goldberg (four times).
Conan O'Brien hosted the 97th Oscars in March 2025 and has already been confirmed to return for the 2026 ceremony, positioning him as one of the show's contemporary masters of ceremonies alongside Jimmy Kimmel, who has hosted four times and expertly navigated the infamous Best Picture envelope fiasco in 2017.
Where Else Have We Seen This Type of Unprecedented Shift?
The Oscars' move to YouTube isn't happening in a vacuum; it's part of a broader transformation in how marquee live events reach audiences:
The SAG Awards Lead the Way: Netflix secured rights to the SAG Awards (now rebranded as "The Actor Awards presented by SAG-AFTRA"), which has streamed on the platform since 2024 as part of a multi-year exclusive partnership running through 2026 and beyond. This marks the first time one of the big four awards shows (Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and Tonys) left broadcast TV entirely in favor of streaming.
NFL Christmas Games Go Streaming: Netflix streamed its first-ever NFL Christmas Gameday in 2024, with games averaging more than 26.5 million viewers in the U.S. and over 30 million globally; positioning them as the two most-streamed NFL games in U.S. history. The 2025 Christmas Day games continue on Netflix, with a third game airing on Amazon Prime Video.
The Grammys' Musical Chairs: Disney recently acquired the rights to the Grammy Awards from CBS, underscoring the value traditional broadcasters still place on live events even as they lose other tentpole properties.
What This Means for the Industry
The implications of the Oscars' shift extend far beyond one awards ceremony:
For Traditional Broadcasters: The loss represents more than a ratings blow, it's a symbolic defeat. For Disney/ABC executives, losing the Oscars to YouTube doesn't sting as hard as it would have had it wound up on a direct competitor like NBCUniversal, but it still marks a retreat from live cultural programming that once defined network television's primacy.
ABC took solace in noting that 2027 will still see them broadcast the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and the Grammys all in one year: a trifecta of premium live content. But the future beyond 2028 looks decidedly less certain.
For YouTube and Streaming Platforms: Landing the world's highest-profile and most-watched awards show is a big feather in the cap of deep-pocketed YouTube, which is intent on becoming "the most powerful platform on earth". The platform has been aggressively pursuing premium live content, including exclusive NFL games and major boxing events.
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan told The Hollywood Reporter: "YouTube is the epicenter of culture. And what I mean by that is it is where culture is set, it creates these moments. But the amazing thing about that culture setting is that it's participatory, it's like a fandom."
For Creators and Traditional Hollywood: The tension between YouTube's creator economy and traditional Hollywood will come to a head with this partnership. YouTube will have to figure out how its creator community fits into its Oscars broadcast. If YouTube beats the creator drum too fiercely, it risks alienating the traditionalists who don't know MrBeast from Adam (and prefer to keep it that way).
But there's also opportunity: YouTube should be proud of its contributions to cinema, especially as creators like RackaRacka and Chris Stuckmann become in-demand Hollywood filmmakers.
Production Control and Innovation: YouTube doesn't have a production infrastructure like the ones that even streamers like Netflix and Amazon have built to produce live events, meaning the Academy will likely take over full production of the show, giving them creative carte blanche in ways they never had under ABC's oversight.
The Concerns and Questions
Not everyone is celebrating the move. Screenwriter Daniel Kunka remarked on X: "YouTube broadcasting the Oscars is like shaking hands with the guy who's trying to kill you"—a sentiment that captures the industry's ambivalence about partnering with a platform that has fundamentally disrupted traditional distribution models.
Several questions remain unanswered, including what happens to the Academy's international distribution deals for the Oscars, which represent additional license fee revenue. It's also unclear how viewership will be measured. YouTube won't provide the same Nielsen report card that linear television offers, making year-over-year comparisons difficult.
There's also the question of YouTube viewers' attention spans, although videos have grown in length on the service over the years, the specter of audience members losing attention and going elsewhere on the site looms large.
The Bottom Line
The Oscars on YouTube aren't just a broadcast shift-they're part of a broader evolution in entertainment distribution and audience connection. For filmmakers and fans, the move signals the Academy's intention to modernize and expand engagement, meeting audiences where they are while acknowledging that broadcast TV no longer holds a monopoly on live cultural moments.
Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Academy President Lynette Howell Taylor stated: "This partnership will allow us to expand access to the work of the Academy to the largest worldwide audience possible which will be beneficial for our Academy members and the film community. This collaboration will leverage YouTube's vast reach and infuse the Oscars and other Academy programming with innovative opportunities for engagement while honoring our legacy."
The question isn't whether the Oscars will survive this transition. The Academy Awards have endured for nearly a century through countless industry upheavals. The real question is how the marriage between Hollywood's most elite institution and the internet's most democratic platform will reshape what it means to celebrate cinema in the 21st century.
As traditional gatekeepers give way to algorithmic recommendations and broadcast schedules yield to on-demand viewing, the Oscars' move to YouTube represents both an ending and a beginning, the closing of television's golden age and the opening of something entirely new.
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