In two decades, the app has grown from a user-generated circus into the most powerful platform on earth. CEO Neal Mohan on his $100 billion vision for YouTube’s future and the disruption it’s left in…
For a moment, the 50-yard line at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, was the media capital of the world. As the San Francisco 49ers were warming up for a Sept. 21 game against the Arizona Cardinals, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell caught the eye of Neal Mohan. The YouTube CEO, flanked by a handful of his platform’s top creators, marched onto the field and embraced Goodell.
About an hour or so after their meeting on the field, the moguls addressed creators and guests in a suite. “We want to continue to double down on that partnership you saw,” the YouTube chief said, referring to the first exclusive NFL game that YouTube hosted live, the Sept. 5 contest between the Los Angeles Chargers and Kansas City Chiefs, which they played in Brazil.
“More to come, right?” Goodell quipped in response.
“Well, that’s up for you to decide,” Mohan replied.
When asked a few minutes later whether that means YouTube is in a strong position to carry exclusive NFL games going forward, Goodell was unequivocal. “Absolutely,” he said.
But as big a deal as YouTube becoming a league broadcast partner would be (on top of its existing $2 billion deal for NFL Sunday Ticket), the platform’s scale and cultural relevance were also on display in Santa Clara. Even with the 49ers on the field, a large group of kids on a rope line near the stands were screaming for one of the creators that had joined Mohan, sports influencer Jesse “Jesser” Riedel, as parents jockeyed to get them closer for a photo or autograph.
“It’s a blessing,” Jesser said modestly after heading back into a tunnel under the stands, away from the roar of the crowd. The kids were there for the 49ers, but a YouTuber stole the show.
***
During the past 20 years, the Google-owned YouTube has slowly — then rapidly — become a dominant force in media, the hub for a wide array of genres, from talk and comedy to food and unscripted fare. But the bigger prize for the video platform would be to take over the other hours people are spending on their TV sets, and there are signs that YouTube is close to a breakthrough there.
Sports, led by the NFL, is in many ways the final frontier for YouTube to conquer. The platform is on the verge of subsuming the genres that have helped define the past 100 years of TV. In fact, the CEO noted in his annual letter to the YouTube community that the platform’s viewership on TV sets has “surpassed mobile and is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S.”
For someone running one of the most important entertainment companies in the world, Mohan, 52, is very much of the Silicon Valley mold, not a creature of Hollywood. He has an electrical engineering degree from Stanford and was an executive at the ad tech firm DoubleClick when Google acquired it in 2007, joining it in the deal. He went on to lead the tech giant’s display business before becoming YouTube’s chief product officer in 2015 and its CEO in 2023.
He carries himself with an amiable and good-natured Midwestern attitude (he was born in Indiana, where his dad was a grad student at Purdue). It’s a personality that meshes well with YouTube’s stable of creators, many of whom are, befitting their on-camera personalities, over-the-top and engaging. Just as Hollywood executives are eager to give notes to creators and put their stamp on content, Mohan is happy to step back and let the creators on his platform lead the way.
While the creators at the NFL game were filming a wacky sketch in the end zone, Mohan was watching from the sidelines, beaming at the access his platform gave them. It was a real-life metaphor: Mohan is happy to cheer from the sidelines while the creators are in the spotlight.
But while he is a tech executive first and foremost, Mohan says that it is his “deeply personal” love of stories that keeps him engaged.
“I am a technologist, but I also love media and storytelling. I’ve been that way since I can remember, I’m a fan myself, fundamentally,” he says. “Leading YouTube is a privilege where I can actually bring both those pieces together, that human storytelling and creativity and the best of technology, that’s what motivates me every morning.”
As Mohan is fond of saying, “There’s only one YouTube,” and in a landscape littered with streaming services, it can still find ways to surprise. On Sept. 16, a few days before his summit with Goodell in Santa Clara, Mohan took to the stage in Google’s office at Pier 57 in New York with news to share: Over the past four years, YouTube had paid out more than $100 billion to its creators, artists and media partners. After his presentation to creators ended, he stood on the stage in the Google office taking photos with attendees, chatting about their hopes and concerns.
Walking through New York’s Meatpacking District later that evening to a reception the platform was hosting, Mohan reflected on that moment onstage. “There are two really fundamental things that we do for creators,” he said. “One is help them build an audience and connect with their fans, regardless of where those fans are in the world; and the second thing we do is we help them build businesses. That’s what that $100 billion represents for me.”
It’s also reflected in the company’s bottom line: YouTube generated more than $36 billion in advertising revenue in 2024, and executives say annual revenue — including subscriptions like YouTube Premium and YouTube Music — tops $50 billion, with revenues shared with the more than 3 million creators in its Partner Program, which reflects channels monetizing their videos. Both numbers are rising fast, even as traditional entertainment companies find themselves stagnating.
It’s come a long way since the 19-second “me at the zoo” video was uploaded in April 2005. Now, per a KPMG report released Sept. 23, YouTube is second only to Comcast in terms of annual content spend, inclusive of payments to creators and media companies, paying out as much as Netflix and Paramount combined, $32 billion.
Already, many of the genres that once defined cable TV have migrated to YouTube. Chefs explaining recipes in the kitchen, once the domain of Food Network, have moved there (even The New York Times‘ cooking section is going all in on YouTube videos), while creators like Dude Perfect and Mark Rober are creating shows that would once have been right at home on Discovery Channel or Nickelodeon.
The only question is what genres it will take over next, and how quickly it will do so. From talk shows to scripted dramas to, yes, live sports, there are signs that the platform’s ambitions will collide with the traditional TV business sooner rather than later.
***
Everyone knows late night TV is in trouble. The Late Show With Stephen Colbert has been canceled at CBS, while Jimmy Kimmel’s short-lived suspension at ABC brought fresh attention to the struggles of the format. YouTube has slowly, then all at once, become the de facto home for what had been late night, not only for the shows on linear TV, but for an emerging crop of new talent born on the platform.
As it happens, late night itself transformed YouTube when the Saturday Night Live skit “Lazy Sunday” went viral 20 years ago on the platform, which had only been live for a few months.
“One of the really big [shifts] was Saturday Night Live and clips getting consumed not on Saturday night but on Sunday morning, when people would open up YouTube,” Mohan says, adding that it was in his mind a “seminal moment” in the platform’s history. “In that sense, they were a pioneer in getting their content out to so many viewers.”
It was a seminal moment inside the big media companies, too.
“As somebody who was at NBC at the time, part of the thinking was, ‘How do we build out the NBC universe of websites so that people know to come here to get the clips of these shows?’ ” recalls Gavin Purcell, the former showrunner for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “[YouTube] knew the value of having it all in one place.”
As consumer preferences collide with a burgeoning ecosystem of video podcasts (YouTube now claims more than 1 billion podcast users monthly), the world of late night, and for that matter TV talk shows more generally, increasingly revolves around the platform.
One current late night producer says that almost every A-list booking now includes some sort of sketch or bit that they think will play well on YouTube, but booking those guests in the first place has become less of a sure thing. A veteran Hollywood publicist says that for many of their clients, they are now recommending that YouTube podcasts or shows become the first stop, or at least a major stop, on press tours.
Just look at Alex Cooper, whose recent guests on Call Her Daddy include Cardi B and Gwyneth Paltrow; Brittany Broski, who spoke to David Corenswet for her series Royal Court; or Travis and Jason Kelce’s New Heights, which hosted Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio Del Toro to talk about One Battle After Another, not to mention Taylor Swift, Travis’ fiancée, to announce her new album. “I think Royal Court is an exciting example that was, by accident, what the new Hollywood is shaping up to be,” Broski says. “I’m not trying to get you. I’m not trying to get the tea. I want to hang out with you.”
In fact, what had been late night is being splintered into pieces, where consumers can create their own show, complete with comedy sketches, political monologues and jokes, musical performances and interview segments all pulled from different channels.
“It gets reconstituted in your feed, which is a personalized set of preferences in terms of what speaks to you around that particular format, whether it’s the monologue, whether it’s the sketch, whether it’s what Brittany [Broski] does in terms of the conversation,” Mohan says.
“All of us on YouTube come from a world where when you want to create something, you just go do it,” says Adam Waheed (he goes by “Adam W”), whose YouTube comedy sketches routinely draw millions of views on the platform. “You don’t wait for somebody, you don’t ask somebody. You just go make it. And you get feedback right away.”
That freedom is particularly relevant in the moment, with Colbert on the way out next year and Kimmel surely weighing his options at ABC.
“As you’ve no doubt observed, many people who came from that linear background have found lots of success on YouTube and been able to control their destiny and their creative ambitions,” Mohan says, perhaps tempting the fate of broadcast TV veterans.
The result of the podcast explosion and the late night revolution is what Purcell calls a “flattening” of the format, where big stars can leverage their fame to become major YouTube creators and creators can leverage the platform to become big stars themselves.
“The people that used to host podcasts were no-names in some form, and a lot of names have come into this space,” says Purcell, who also co-hosts a podcast himself on YouTube called AI For Humans. “I would argue that Amy Poehler’s podcast [Good Hang] is not that different than what, say, Tom Snyder was doing at 12:30 back in the day, except she’s funnier and she’s more charming, and the guests that come in are bigger because of the distribution platform.”
Nielsen has been tracking the streaming platforms that consumers watch on their TV screens ever since it launched what it calls The Gauge in 2021. But over the past year, YouTube’s domination of The Gauge has unnerved executives at some competitors. The most recent Gauge report showed that YouTube was by far the most watched video platform, holding 13.1 percent share. Netflix, in second place, was at 8.7 percent.
Nielsen senior vp product strategy Brian Fuhrer says that today reminds him of the early days of cable TV. “As the cable networks got bigger and bigger, and they had a lot of penetration, their ratings naturally increased,” he says.
It was a flywheel effect, a flywheel that now appears in motion for YouTube, at the same time that most of the rest of the streaming business (Netflix notably excluded) is stuck in stagnation.
***
In an industrial park in the shadow of the Burbank airport, a suburban street is coming to life. There are shops and restaurants, a school and homes, both wealthy and more working class. Pumpkins appear on the doorsteps around Halloween, and Christmas lights around the holidays, but not everything is as it seems.
The street is a facade. It’s a full-scale set inside the 125,000-square foot-studio of Dhar Mann, the YouTube creator who is on a mission to turbocharge the creation of inspiring, uplifting scripted entertainment.
Mann is perhaps the biggest creator in the scripted space on YouTube, with his studio turning out everything from shortform scenes to feature-length movies.
In YouTube’s quest to take over TV, scripted entertainment may be the ultimate challenge. The cultural relevance of shows like The White Lotus or Abbott Elementary simply hasn’t been replicated yet on a user-generated platform, though Mann’s operation is a sign of just how far things have come.
“A lot of times when people think of YouTube content, it’s mainly spectacle-based or gamified, or music or podcasting, reactionary content, but there’s a whole ecosystem of scripted content that’s really growing, and I think it’s going to be one of the areas that really explodes,” Mann says.
“I do think it is maybe the early phases of growth that we’re seeing there,” affirms Mohan.
Mann, like many other creators, does not produce content at the cadence that traditional studios do. He will have as many as eight productions going at once in his studio, spanning lengths and genres.
“Traditional Hollywood is like, ‘I’ll put out eight episodes or 10 episodes of something, and it took me a year to make it,’ ” says Nic Paul, the president of Spotter, which provides capital, tools and resources to creators. “These creators are every week engaging with tens of millions of unique viewers and hundreds of millions of views in 30 days. They’re putting out content either several times a week, every week or every other week. Audiences no longer have to wait.”
But scripted content is also at the heart of one of the tensest parts of the relationship between YouTube, the platform, and the ecosystem of creators who populate it.
Unlike with Netflix or HBO, YouTube creators are taking on the risk for their projects (though, granted, there’s a great disparity in production budgets). If Netflix likes a concept, it picks it up, providing the budget and resources to help get it over the finish line. On YouTube, it is up to the creator to finance and produce their content, and while the platform regularly releases new tools to help them (including AI-enabled tech that suggests video ideas and can create short background videos for use in Shorts), scripted entertainment is a particularly tricky challenge, requiring writers, directors, sets, costumes, lighting, editing, special effects and other production requirements that may go beyond the typical creator-led show.
“If you’re working on scripted, you sometimes might need some of those resources,” Mohan says, arguing that the infrastructure is being built before our eyes. “The best sort of visual example in my head is, if you go down to Burbank, you’ll see on one end of the town, a storied studio like Walt Disney, and then you’ll see rows of these smaller studios.
“It’s just like what happens right here in Silicon Valley, which is that next to the big technology companies, you have this startup ecosystem,” he adds. “People like Kinigra Deon and Dhar Mann and Mythical Entertainment and Alan Chikin Chow, they’re the startups of Hollywood.”
And just like tech startups, that sometimes means looking for outside financing and support.
Some of the biggest creators have turned to the major studios and streamers to help them do the projects they want to do (see MrBeast’s nine-figure deal for Beast Games with Prime Video) or are seeking to raise money to bulk up (MrBeast and Mann have been in the market).
Others have turned to private equity, with several PE-backed firms promising six- and seven-figure investments (in some cases eight figures) to subsidize the production of shows that will live on YouTube in exchange for partial ownership of the show in question.
“There’s a burgeoning ecosystem of investors and studios that are backing YouTube content to bridge that gap” between creativity and financing, one connected source says. “Obviously, there’s a trade-off with that, because you end up giving upside in ownership.”
But creator-driven scripted content may be rising at the perfect moment for Hollywood, which is in the midst of a historic pullback in the genre after years of explosive growth.
“That competition for their IP is going to just get greater and greater,” says Frank Albarella, the U.S. sector leader for media and telecommunications at KPMG. “The evolution of what we’re seeing in terms of viewer preferences is lining up with this transformation of the models from that traditional high-cost, high-investment, high-risk production model, to the user-generated content model.”
Mann, for his part, says that when his studio creates a feature-length scripted film, it costs in the low six figures to produce from start to finish, a fraction of what even the nimblest of traditional production companies operate under.
It’s caught the eye of Hollywood veterans, too: Mann says that he has spoken to executives at traditional studios desperate to understand how he produces content at a fraction of the cost: “As you know, production budgets are constantly getting cut. Production in L.A. is down 45 percent last time I checked, so many studio lots are sitting vacant,” he says.
A creator-led studio is not going to sit back and let its lots remain vacant for long.
***
Across the country, Kinigra Deon is buying a school in Birmingham, Alabama. Known for her scripted content that touches on comedy, drama and even fantasy, this creator has been quietly building out a studio complex where she and her team can soon double their output, and the former Jefferson County school building will make for a critical piece of the puzzle, with so many of her shows and scenes set in schools. Scrolling through photos of the project on her phone, Deon shows off the construction that includes a creator lounge, a place where the actors she casts in her shows and videos can conceptualize and create their own content.
“The goal is to cast more in Alabama, to make Alabama more of a hub for filming and entertainment,” Deon says. The state, in turn, has revamped its entertainment incentive program, which went into effect Oct. 1, upping its annual production cap to $22 million.
Deon is a textbook example of how YouTube is shifting the center of gravity away from Los Angeles, spreading it across the country. Just as MrBeast has turned Greenville, North Carolina, into a veritable company town, Deon wants to turn Birmingham into a true production hub.
Her next big bet is a feature-length movie, backed by Kevin Hart’s HartBeat and the Amazon-funded Spotter. “What I’m hoping for when we release that movie is that it sends a widespread message that you don’t have to wait to release something that you’re passionate about. You just have to do it,” Deon says.
Scott Purdy, the U.S. media industry leader at KPMG, says that more traditional studios and platforms will ultimately pursue deals with scripted creators, though it may take time for some to emerge. MrBeast, for example, isn’t stopping with just Amazon. His company recently hired Corie Henson, the former head of unscripted at NBC, to lead his company’s new studio, which includes animation and scripted content.
In some cases, however, that jump is being made more out of necessity.
“A lot of YouTubers feel as if they have a lot of control over their work and their time and their content, and that’s true to an extent, but algorithm changes can have a significant impact on your success,” says one creator who has spoken to other streaming services about licensing content, explaining why they are exploring options.
“We’re proud of the fact that YouTube is this epicenter of culture, and it looks like other companies have noticed that as well,” Mohan says with a smile when asked about interest from other companies in creator-led content. “But I would also say that what creators always tell me is that their home is YouTube, so I love the fact that they use their success on YouTube to create these other opportunities for themselves.”
Perhaps the most significant things that need to happen for scripted content to break out, multiple sources across the creator ecosystem say, is for ad dollars to migrate from prestige TV (or at least linear TV) toward scripted creators, and for the user experience to match.
“Brands need to recognize the opportunity that’s happening with YouTube — which they are — and that’s going to cause CPMs to start to rise,” Mann says, explaining his thesis. “At a certain point, you get to an inflection point where the cost of creating content is cheaper than the amount of revenue that you can generate because CPMs are going up, costs are going down. And then ultimately, it’s whoever can build the biggest community.”
And YouTube is building out a TV experience that is better suited for that model, rolling out a redesign on TVs that is, frankly, more Netflix-like in appearance, allowing creators to structure their channels around shows and seasons in pursuit of a more traditional TV experience, albeit supplemented with YouTube traits like comments.
“YouTube doesn’t feel like a scripted environment quite yet,” one business-side source says, adding that ultimately, the “monetization plus user experience will get there.”
There are signs that media buyers and marketers are trending in that direction.
“I’ve brought chief investment officers and chief marketing officers to some of these studios, and they can start to see how big a business and how scaled the opportunity is for them,” says Sean Downey, the executive who oversees YouTube parent Google’s sprawling ad sales business. “When you bring 10 clients to see MrBeast in North Carolina, you can start to see the creativity, how they can lift the business, how they integrate their brand into the consumer viewing; you start to see the light bulb go off.”
It’s another way of saying that the platform believes that its $36 billion-plus in annual advertising revenue is still at the early stages of a long runway.
That is also reflected in YouTube’s conquering of what was once a flagship event of the broadcast TV era: upfront week. The annual spectacle, with thousands of media buyers and advertisers crisscrossing Manhattan to be wooed and pitched by TV networks, has already transformed into something more corporate. Disney pitched every piece of its media empire, not just ABC; Paramount exited the week altogether; and Netflix and Amazon shoved their way in as they seek more ad dollars.
But YouTube has settled in as the week’s culminating event, taking over Lincoln Center with its Brandcast event and delivering a show with more assuredness and confidence than its competitors, analog or digital, multiple media buyers said. This year’s show, presided over by Broski, saw MrBeast doing a stunt with former NFL stars Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman and Hot Ones host Sean Evans making an appearance. The platform, Mohan told the buyers in attendance, is the only place where viewership can be measured in billions, with a “B,” a scale unmatched by any competitor. The event concluded with a set from Lady Gaga, complete with costume changes and a full band. “Today, YouTube has become the epicenter of culture,” Mohan said. “And I don’t mean short-lived fads or a one-off hit show. I mean culture with a capital ‘C.’ The place where day after day, year after year, the events, conversations and voices that define the moment break through.”
Of course, YouTube’s immense scale is also the source of the most grumbling from its studio and streaming competitors. Many YouTube creators view the studio executives as gatekeepers, the old guard that once held sway over what got made and what didn’t. Studio executives, meanwhile, dismiss YouTube and its growth as something less than the sum of its parts. Sure, there are big channels operated by traditional media companies, and some creators are doing good work, but in terms of raw numbers, most content uploaded to the platform is anything but premium.
“There’s still a perception, particularly in the traditional space around YouTube and YouTube culture, that’s probably looked down upon,” one high-level source who plays in both worlds says. “I don’t think the audience gives a shit, or at least a segment of the audience, but I do think there’s a little bit of a hump to overcome there.”
Yes, Mark Rober is shooting rockets into space, and Kinigra Deon is filming original fantasy shows, but videos about fixing your dishwasher and a three-hour feed of a hike through a wooded trail are there right next to them. There are clips from Last Week Tonight but also clips from classic David Letterman episodes, baseball games from the 1970s, gamers playing Fortnite and New Year’s Eve ball drops from 1956.
It’s a hotbed of creativity “but it’s also, frankly, just a reflection of humanity,” Mohan says.
While a platform like HBO carefully curates its content, YouTube has something for everyone and bets that it can use its algorithm to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.
But the scale of the platform is also why many creators have sought to leverage their reach to move beyond it. “The value for [YouTube] is the platform over the individuals. No one individual, not even MrBeast, really moves the needle for them,” one source says.
It’s a big reason why creators are leaning into consumer products like snacks and skin care creams and why people like Mann and Ms. Rachel are also licensing their content to such platforms as Netflix and Samsung TV Plus. “I’ve always felt that it’s easier to turn an audience into dollars than dollars into an audience, and so you might as well start where someone already has an audience if you want to run a successful business,” one creator says. For creators, it’s about minimizing risk, though YouTube can (and does) frame it as a positive. “The beauty of the YouTube model is you control your own destiny,” Mohan says. “You own the content, you’re not licensing the content. It’s yours, you get to choose how you want to monetize it.”
Sitting on a stool on the stage in the Google New York office after the creator event, Mohan was asked by Max Klymenko, who hosts a show called Career Ladder, whether the emergence of “creators” as a career has changed his approach personally as an executive. Mohan responds in the affirmative, noting the studios that people like Deon and Mann have built. “It’s personally very important for me to not just continue to grow this creator ecosystem, but for it to actually be a viable, respectable and sustainable career path for lots of young people in this country and really, all over the world,” he says.
The moment Mohan realized that the combination of YouTube’s creators and the NFL’s live games could work well together was at a league owners meeting, where the CEO had brought Mark Rober to explain what he does to the attendees.
“All the NFL owners are there, Roger and his team are there, and all the young people there — the kids and the grandkids — they were obviously interested in the athletes, but they swarmed Mark rover as soon as he got off stage,” Mohan recalls. “For me, that was when it clicked, these YouTubers are a phenomenon into themselves … I knew at that moment that this bet between the NFL and YouTube was going to have this greater magic to it.”
Viewers of the Brazil game got a taste of what’s possible: “Watch With” parties saw creators provide their own live commentary, in something akin to ESPN’s Manningcast. It doesn’t take much to imagine a future where games have dozens, or even hundreds, of creator commentary options. The platform has also used its relationship to get creators access to the field, to locker rooms, to places that in the recent past would have been off-limits.
“I feel like the ecosystem is really blending, the creators have built a new lane in terms of the content they’re making, where each creator is their own production company and making their own sports content, and now they’re merging more and more with traditional sports,” says Jesser.
Many of YouTube’s most popular creators release sports-adjacent content weekly, from Dude Perfect to Deestroying, Jesser to iShowSpeed. But in a move that has raised the eyebrows of Hollywood executives, YouTube has been getting into business with the leagues more directly.
When YouTube cut a deal to pay the NFL about $2 billion annually for the NFL Sunday Ticket streaming service in 2022, it stunned the TV business, signaling that it was serious about sports – the last frontier of traditional TV domination. In addition to the NFL, sources say that YouTube has been in the mix for several major sports rights over the last year or so.
Mohan acknowledges that he was “nervous” ahead of the Brazil game. “It was a really big moment for YouTube, it was a really big moment for our partners in the NFL,” he recalls. Luckily, the telecast went off without any technical hitches, drawing a solid 17.3 million viewers. “I joined my wife and some friends at a barbecue at a neighbor’s house afterwards and just had this sense of relief in terms of how smooth and well things went.”
“They’ve been terrific partners. They brought us a new audience,” Goodell says. “They bring incredible production value. These creators are really an element that has been very well received by our fans — and new fans — people who want to get involved in the game.”
So why pay for exclusive rights and production costs, in contrast to almost all other content on the platform?
“The nice thing about sports is, if you use that term creator in the broadest sense, the NFL is a creator of content, it’s not something that we’re scripting,” Mohan says. “I think in a fundamental sense, it’s about the fact that we have hundreds of millions of sports fans on the platform, and it’s a really important vertical of content, and we want to be super-serving our fans.”
Indeed, the NFL may be the biggest programming on TV, but the league, like YouTube, wants more. More female fans, more international fans, and younger fans that can ensure that the league can thrive 50 years down the line.
And the league increasingly views the creator ecosystem that YouTube has sustained as a bridge to that younger audience. “I think teams and leagues see the value in the reach that content creators have,” says sports creator Katie Feeney. “The goal is always to build a new audience, to reach new eyes. I’m a Gen Z creator, my target demo is in that 18 to 24 demographic, which is a sweet spot for sports, and especially when you’re looking to build a new fan base, this is the new generation.”
“It’s very clear that the young fan in particular wants to consume the live game, is interested in the athletes, but oftentimes they want to consume the highlights, the postgame and pregame commentary during the week through their favorite YouTubers and creators,” says Mohan.
It’s a fact not lost on Goodell either. “The thing that always impresses me is how smart they are, how creative they are, and the detail they put into their production,” he says of the creators he has met with.
NFL games garner tens of millions of viewers every week, and the Super Bowl is a veritable national holiday, topping 100 million viewers handily year after year. The NBA has become a focal point of American culture, while the brutalism of UFC is appealing to a larger audience year after year.
All of those leagues (not to mention media partners like ESPN) have turned to YouTube as the home base for clips and highlights, but live games are the final frontier, the glue holding the traditional TV ecosystem together.
If YouTube does supplant what we think of as “TV” today, there’s a good chance that the Brazil game is a pivot point. And the platform’s creators, many of whom have felt the sting of the traditional studio system, certainly have no qualms about embracing that future, one that blends professional production and creator-driven content in surprising ways.
“Prior to [YouTube], the only way to get a show made was to walk into a room of people wearing suits, hope that they like it enough to give it a pilot, hope that they like the pilot enough to give it a season, hope that they put marketing budget behind it so people know to watch it,” says Michelle Khare, whose series, Challenge Accepted, pushes the boundaries of what is possible on the platform in terms of the quality of its production. “Systematically, that is a system that has failed a lot of people and only allowed so many stories to be told. I’m excited to be part of a future where the only barrier to entry is the upload button.”
This story appeared in the Oct. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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Comments
In my circle, piracy is making a comeback. We're tired of having to hunt down streaming services, and be extorted for hundreds of euro a month, just to see ads for their own programs.
Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.
By benbristow 2025-10-2616:487 reply Too many services nowadays. Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything, no ads, full quality. Nowadays Netflix price has gone up, additional plans for 4K/no-ads, anti-account sharing and less content as content now has gone to Amazon/Disney+/Hulu/Discovery+/Paramount+/Peacock/HBO etc. etc.
Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything. Sailing the seas, you get everything for free or for a couple dollars a month for a more premium experience.
Time for change.
By CaptainOfCoit 2025-10-2617:011 reply > Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything
And even if you could get all the video itself, it's not guaranteed you'd get the right video+audio+subtitles combination that you want, as everything seems to be negotiated separately.
So while one service could offer the right audio and the right video but not the subtitles you want, another service could have the right video and the right subtitles but instead be dubbed without original audio.
It became a whole mess for people and eventually it was again simpler to just resort to piracy for the even the slightly technical consumers.
By estimator7292 2025-10-271:213 reply Man, jellyfin is shockingly absolutely killer for subtitles. I don't remember if it's a plugin or built in, but there's a subtitle search option that cross-references your video's filename into some database that usually gives you a workable set of subs.
Plus it respects your options to default subs on or off, in a language you choose, in a style you like to see. I don't think any streaming services do it this well honestly
By walthamstow 2025-10-278:49 Plex also has this
By hellotheretoday 2025-10-274:12 Kodi has this as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if similar functionality was also in plex/emby too
"Some database", could it be opensubtitles.org ? Sigh, if I were them I'd be annoyed that my work is hidden away behind the words "some database".
By joseda-hg 2025-10-2713:12 The plugin does name them, but that's the nature of work so good as to become invisible, you don't actually see it unless you already know (Or care/need to look into it)
Higher price, 1080p cap, no account sharing… that’s one thing.
But the content issue is just so dumb (and I’m not blaming Netflix).
I suppose next we will have a new streaming service for each film and show.
By CaptainOfCoit 2025-10-2617:043 reply Let me pay $0.1 for each episode I watch, make everything available and route to the right entity that should be paid and then offer one cross-platform client that everyone pooled their efforts into. And since we're dreaming, make it a open collaboration with a FOSS client too.
I'd predict most of the piracy would again disappear quickly as long as it's better, faster and has virtually everything people wanna watch. Basically replicate what Spotify did, but more open, so closer to what Grooveshark tried to do I guess.
By benbristow 2025-10-2617:051 reply Grooveshark, that's a name I've not heard in a while...
But even Spotify are putting the price up this year. I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more.
By CaptainOfCoit 2025-10-2617:072 reply > I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more
Yeah probably, until they find the point where more people leave because it's too expensive than they'll earn by raising prices, then they'll oscillate or find a new direction. Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?
By MagnumOpus 2025-10-2617:191 reply Capitalism is supposed to have perfectly competitive goods to be efficient. IP protection - especially the obscene century-long protection of copyrights - renders capitalist competition into monopolistic competition, which no longer maximises consumer surpluses. Hence mandatory licencing can increase benefits for society - and in the past such models worked - e.g. for radio. Today, the only reason content conglomerates get away with it is that they can pay of sufficiently many legislators.
By orwin 2025-10-270:34 That's Adam Smith liberalism. You can have a market and competition without capitalism. Just look at what China did for EVs and solar panels, its full liberalism under state planning.
China does have _some_ capitalism, state capitalism but still, capital owners decide what is produced, with state supervision (nuclear, coal, rail sector, Alibaba). Already for its telco sector we knew it was different, it wasn't like the usual, a sort of capitalist liberalism with state planning. Now we have more data, and i'm not the only one to think its EV boom is the perfect example of a non-capitalist liberalism.
By benbristow 2025-10-2617:131 reply ... so we end up in the same predicament we are now. Maybe the model doesn't work? And no, I'm not a communist.
By CaptainOfCoit 2025-10-2617:36 I think it's broken, yeah. I think the whole "art for money" thing doesn't make sense in general and something else has to be figured out. Artists should be able to survive without depending on things like "perfectly competitive goods" or whatever.
By ta1243 2025-10-2713:50 In 1999 I paid (inflation adjusted) $20 per episode in DS9
If you are only wiling to pay 10 cents then that's a major problem - viewing figures just aren't that high any more. A modern scifi show would need 100 million viewers to cover the production budget at 10 cents a person
The post popular scripted show on US TV - George and Mindy - gets about 5-6 million viewers when it's on for free. At 10c/episode or $2 for the year that would be $10m for the entire season. TV costs a lot more than that to produce.
By tracker1 2025-10-2717:16 This is what Hulu started out as... before ABC/Disney bought everyone else out as they shifted to their own separate services, and now Disney is burying Hulu under Disney+. When Hulu started, it seemed like the solution, but everyone was greedy and wanted a bigger piece of the pie. The same goes for TV/Cable and even streaming "live tv" options. YouTube TV option even tried, originally like $35/mo, but now is just as much as any of the other "Live TV" services (in the US at least), north of $80/mo.
Piracy is the answer... though, it's aa couple extra hoops to jump through... using a seedbox over self-hosting that is. I should probably just have a script that does an rsync to my local NAS every few minutes to make it slightly easier... already have a watch script to upload .torrent files to the seedbox.
By snapplebobapple 2025-10-2617:371 reply This is what copyright does though by design. Everyone leverages the monopoly granted by government to maximize profit because its way easier to force people to your service for maximum profit and compete (n offerings rather than everyone ha>ing the same offerings and competing on price and user experience. This is also causing the crazy market dislocation from hige show budgets because they are tryingto invest in their competitive edge when creativity doesnt work on big budgets at all. it needs a constraint to push on.
By arielcostas 2025-10-298:511 reply Plus exclusivity, probably. Music abides by the same copyright laws yet you don't need to subscribe to Spotify to listen to certain artists, or pay YT Music Premium for someone else. I'm not including podcasts here, since they are more of a "production" itself rather than just owning the rights.
By snapplebobapple 2025-11-034:46 The government came in and spanked the music industry back when it was radio primarily and that caused a licencing and payment regime to be codified that forced this as a matter of custom. The situation in video has always been exclusivity to channel partners and replayability didn't play a big role until the industry was pretty mature so no spanking from government has yet to materialize in the video market to fix this situation to the extent possible under the currenty broken copyright regime.
Too many services is a good problem to have in a regular market. The problem is the accessibility and fragmentation of content. If all services had the same content, they would have to compete on the features, price and performance, which would be a healthy form of competition.
By dostick 2025-10-2817:05 Yes, need proper standardisation. we are now in the era when there’s fragmentation in a tape audio players, with dozen of different incompatible cassette tape formats and musicians having lock-in contracts with one format each. To listen to all music you would have to buy each player on the market. Only piracy allows you to buy just one tape player and have copies of all other tapes to play.
By netdevphoenix 2025-10-279:521 reply > Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything
This was problematic too. Centralisation is never good in the long-term. Surely, we would have learned that from traditional media, AWS outages or autocratic structures. Humanity as so much to learn still
Centralized marketplaces can work, but it’s hard to maintain those (there is one Centralized Internet, not many various internets, for example).
A subscription service that “covers all” like we usually get with music would be quite nice, even if it was only “older” shows after a year or so.
There isn't one centralised internet, its thousands of autonomous systems which connect to each other using a common language.
Now sure, some companies try hard to centralise it and own it, this leads to a more fragile ecosystem.
By bombcar 2025-10-2719:07 I mean that as a customer, you buy "one Internet" and get the "whole thing", you don't have to connect to various internets depending on what you want that day (as you did before by dialing into BBSes).
Companies and countries are doing their darnedest to break the Internet up into separate, smaller networks.
By mgh2 2025-10-275:55 I hope Apple TV doesn't get into the bandwagon
By Tadpole9181 2025-10-2618:562 reply > Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything.
Do you actually need everything, everywhere, all at once?
Do one at a time and then switch after you run out of shows or if another service has a "must-watch".
By array_key_first 2025-10-2619:391 reply Or, just pirate it. The quality will probably be better, anyway.
By Tadpole9181 2025-10-2620:102 reply Eh, depends. Pirates these days need to burn hardware keys for 4K, so only sponsored or high-popularity stuff gets it. Everything else gets 1080p, though some groups do upscaling to try and make up for it.
If the content has a Blu-ray release, the pirated content will usually be better than the stream. But you could also purchase the Blu-ray yourself.
Anyway, pirating is illegal. I totally respect it for those who can't pay due to economic bloc or age, or as a form of protest... but hearing folk with 6-figure salaries bemoan having to pay too much, then act like children when told they could just take turn with the toys does rub me the wrong way.
I'll pay 100 USD a month for an 'everything' subscription. That option doesn't exist, and piracy is by far the best option outside of that.
By tracker1 2025-10-2717:23 I'm there with you... I even pay/paid for a number of them at once for a long time... my SO would usually use their dedicated apps for streaming. Me, I'd sail the high seas just because the final landing point on my NAS was easier to watch through Kodi than dealing with the UI of many of the services themselves.
Amazon Prime used to have each season of each show separated, for example... Hulu and Hulu Live TV mess with each other, and fragment older episodes... Disney+ is a pain to use.. Paramount/CBS breaks with the PiHole... they all kinda suck in so many ways. I actually pay for YouTube ad free, it covers music as well... and I tend to watch from the couch. I've started using Rumble a little more, but the TV UX leaves a lot of room for improvement. Similar for Pepperbox and other alt streaming options.
By parineum 2025-10-275:15 It's not about paying too much, it's about the actual experience.
While streaming has gotten (and continues to) progressively worse, pirating just gets better.
By benbristow 2025-10-2619:091 reply Why are you simping for the shareholders? I should have the choice of anything I want to watch. The unethical option provides all and is cheaper than a subscription for a single one of those services.
Besides, those services often make it difficult to unsubscribe with dark patterns.
By Tadpole9181 2025-10-2620:064 reply And why are you acting like you have a right to unlimited access of all content made, regardless of the economics, for $20 a month at the highest quality of service through one platform?
Things cost money, that's the world we live in. You don't have to like it, but it is what it is.
The unethical option is actually illegal and, as more people do it, only game theories everyone else into having to pay more. Feel free to do it, not going to pretend I'm a saint on the matter, but don't act all incredulous and morally superior. You're still here complaining you could steal oxy cheaper than pay for it at a pharmacy; just a different fix.
WRT unsubscribing, I can't relate. It's, what, 5 buttons? I do it every other month and it's never been a problem. Isn't this forum supposed to be techies?
By pjc50 2025-10-2710:13 > right to unlimited access of all content made, regardless of the economics, for $20 a month at the highest quality of service through one platform?
Because the only reason we don't have this is a substantial industry devoted to preventing it? Which simultaneously has a terrible rep for exploiting its workers, the pay non-transparency of Netflix, arbitrary cancellation of incomplete series, and the general fiasco that is David Zaslav.
Heck, I'd take "all content made before 2000 at acceptable quality transfers for $20", but the further back you go the more likely it is that the only online supplier of a movie is a pirate.
(Criterion Channel Online is not available in the UK, which is another bugbear: copyright means arbitrary unavailability)
By benbristow 2025-10-2620:082 reply Because it's totally possible? They've done it with Spotify for music. No reason the same shouldn't be done for films and TV.
By zaphirplane 2025-10-272:141 reply Making a movie or a series is way more expensive than record a song
By Telaneo 2025-10-2712:49 That's an argument for having a more expensive service, not a worse one. Even ignoring price, nothing on the video side comes close to Spotify when it comes to selection, other than Netflix back in the day.
By Tadpole9181 2025-10-2620:451 reply Are we seriously praising Spotify's business model and affect on the creator market?
Not to mention they're up to $12/month. Creating movies and shows is significantly more expensive than music, so it makes sense the price to a catalogue would be scaled by an order of magnitude. Not to mention the increased costs for digital providers for storage, bandwidth, and compute requirements.
I'm, of course, more than happy to hear about how the reruns of Friends could stay on Netflix since it's just a dispute about perceived value. But the rest? Come on, I know you aren't totally ignorant on the economics of these markets.
By tracker1 2025-10-2717:31 I think many people would gladly pay somewhere between $60-100/mo for access to everything either ad free or very minimal ads... nobody offers that. And trying to mix-match always leaves a gaping hole. For that matter, I'd probably do somewhere between $25-50 a season of a show, depending on the show, episodes, run-length etc. As it is, you can get close to this where Blu-ray box sets are an option, and that includes media. Easy enough to rip yourself, though time consuming.
The breaking point is generally around 3-4 of the paid streaming services... many people are going to have Amazon as a baseline for shipping... then you get shoved D+ with every kind of bundling (Verizon, etc) under the sum, then Hulu may or may not be attached... People pay for Netflix out of legacy... that doesn't leave much room for Peacock, Paramount+, AppleTV, etc, etc. It's just easier to say f*ck it and pirate.
Hulu was great for the first couple years... minimal ads, new tv shows same or next day. Then the partners all dropped out with greed as primary motivators.
By RiverCrochet 2025-10-272:452 reply Copyright is supposed to exist for a limited time to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The current 100 year plus regime is effectively forever and not in line with the original constitutional purpose. With reasonable copyright timeframes, at some point all copyright will expire and then everything will be legal. The notion that an artist is entitled to extract money from each eyeball or ear that encounters the work until the heat death of the universe is unethical.
By Tadpole9181 2025-10-273:37 I agree with you, but that's not what's happening in this conversation. Nor are any of these services a historical archive, they are ongoing catalogues and your subscription funds new shows, as well as servicing cost.
And let's not feign ignorance by saying the overwhelming vast majority of things being watched are exactly that new content, not 30 year old reruns of Frasier.
EDIT: I apologize, only ~2 seasons of Frasier would extend past copyright. It started airing 1993.
By crazygringo 2025-10-273:252 reply What does that have to do with streaming services?
Probably 80% of what is watched is from the last year, a lot of it from the last month. Most of the rest is from the past couple decades. The original US copyright law of 1790 allowed for 28 years.
I mean, I agree current copyright is too long. It's just not that relevant to streaming. Not a lot of people are looking to watch old episodes of Knight Rider for free. (Those who are, I salute you.)
By ndriscoll 2025-10-2711:32 Given that the law is broken and the entertainment industry is generally responsible for that, it seems reasonable enough to decide you don't want to give them money that they will use against you (perhaps making exceptions for indie groups). Once you've made that decision, piracy (at least downloading) becomes amoral. Whether you watch the stuff has no effect on anyone else (personally I don't, but more because I'm not interested).
By Telaneo 2025-10-2712:52 You'd be surprised how many people watch Seinfeld and Friends on repeat as comfort shows. Old shows is a pretty large part of their business.
By moi2388 2025-10-2813:03 I do have the right to do this. In my country downloading isn’t illegal, only uploading is. And rightfully so.
By zingababba 2025-10-2619:361 reply For me personally piracy made a comeback when everyone memory-holed "The Speech" episode from IT Crowd. I had even paid for it on a separate platform when Amazon removed it, only to find the platform I paid for it on removed it also. Say what you will about Graham Lineham, I still think it's one of the funniest IT crowd episodes, on par with "The Work Outing". I'd rather not have media I personally enjoy rug-pulled from me in this manner.
Yeah Graham Linehan was a great comedy writer (past tense because I don't think he's writing more, not that he is a horrible writer now), and even though IT Crowd had some really weird episodes towards the end, it's really interesting to see how much his views shifted (in my biased opinion, for the worse) after the show was done.
For people not in the know, Linehan is nowadays a very outspoken voice against "transgenderism", specifically in regards to trans women, and is quite close to the J.K. Rowling sphere of influence. He seems to have given up a lot to end up where he's now.
Now with IT Crowd, it's fascinating that there are the typical early 2000s trans jokes, what with the trans woman getting into a relationship with Douglas because he misheard her saying "I used to be a man", for "I used to be from Iran", after which Douglas and the trans woman get into a fist fight together. This is the episode "The Speech" that the parent is referring to. It's pulled from circulations over allegations of transphobia, but really this wasn't at all abnormal for the time, and there were lots of shows with jokes that, although maybe less physical, were far more cruel to trans women (trans men of course, never really coming up at all, but that's another story). I remember a tweet that called out Linehan for this episode at the time, and he apologized with genuine understanding, no cruelty behind it. That's not something I could ever imagine him doing now. It's a shame in my opinion, I think IT Crowd is one of the better comedy shows of it's time and I don't know if he'll be able to write it now as he used to, as with any deeply held political belief it does seep into the work itself, sometimes making it better, sometimes ruining it, though I will probably not watch anything Linehan will create in the future, sadly.
By giancarlostoro 2025-10-2616:484 reply Just let me buy an MP4 legally for $5 and I will buy every movie.
This is a good point.
I paid many movies on iTunes, and there's no way to access that content anymore, certaily not from my Linux (main) machines.
Also, people who "bought" 1984 on Amazon only to see it disappear from their Kindle will not have been amused.
Nobody likes to have things they spend money on cluttered across 20+ services with changing subscription fees and licensing terms. It's a mess.
By giancarlostoro 2025-10-2717:29 Check out Moviesanywhere lets you sync itunes movies to Google, and other providers including moviesanywhere itself. Its owned by the movie industry iirc so totally legit. Not sure if it will help but it sucks losing an entire movie library otherwise.
Hell, I'd be happy to pay full price to have this option.
All my devices run Linux and apparently there is no amount of money that will let me stream paid content above 480p.
By fxtentacle 2025-10-2617:112 reply Maybe we'll soon see another round of "piracy as a paid service", just like Napster and the beginnings of Spotify.
By plastic_bag 2025-10-273:411 reply That never went away. You still have tons of debrid services.
By bacchusracine 2025-10-2815:08 Shhhhhhhh....
By deaux 2025-10-2619:47 That industry is still worth billions today. IPTV being the biggest one, then there's the debrid sites.
By giancarlostoro 2025-10-2813:36 Hell, sell me BluRays that just contain an "unprotected" MP4 file in them, and I'll pay a little extra if I'm allowed to copy it as much as I want. I promise I wont share my files with anyone else, unless they're over my house to watch a movie together. I would go back to buying movies.
By mixmastamyk 2025-10-271:12 Netflix does 720p and kanopy too, maybe some at 1080p. Need to install widevine.
By titusjohnson 2025-10-2816:35 We need mandatory licensing. It worked for Radio, it can work for Streaming.
There's no reason Netflix and Hulu couldn't both have ALL media available. Then they could actually compete on features and capabilities, not on media catalog.
By tmtvl 2025-10-279:08 I'd buy 720p MP4s for $20, though my tastes in passive visual entertainment are rather niche.
By hedora 2025-10-273:09 I’ll just add that bogus DMCA takedowns (for anticompetitive or censorship goals) are a real burden for many YouTube creators, making supporting their monopoly at least as morally dubious as piracy.
By TechSquidTV 2025-10-2616:592 reply I pirated for many years until Netflix had everything when I was in high school. Roughly around the time I got a job I stopped pirating games and bought everything on Steam. There is still some annoyance with other launchers besides Steam but, I endure.
Its been a long time now but probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again. Now I have a massive Plex server and home lab dedicated to piracy. AND I STILL PAY ~$20/m for Usenet lol.
By CaptainOfCoit 2025-10-2617:062 reply > probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again
Unrelated, but fun example as South Park is probably the only show on TV that also let people watch the entire show (-latest seasons it seems) for free online! https://www.southparkstudios.com/seasons/south-park
Been like that (in many places) for many many years at this point too :)
By justinclift 2025-10-279:021 reply > let people watch the entire show
Isn't that only for people in the US?
By CaptainOfCoit 2025-10-2710:14 I lived in three different countries in my life, and neither of them have been the US, but all of them have apparently had free South Park episodes available to them :)
I don't know if that website works/shows full episodes in the US, currently I'm in a EU country and everything except the last two seasons seems available.
By crtasm 2025-10-2617:48 Depends where you are, I only see short clips on there.
Why so much?
Plex is a pretty light-weight system as long as transcoding is avoided or it has hardware transcoding available to use.
And wrangling Usenet is a fairly simple affair on vaguely modern PC hardware, too.
So all of that stuff runs in the background on the same desktop Linux box that I also use for everything else.
Am I doing it wrong?
By CaptainOfCoit 2025-10-2617:441 reply People use separate computers for wide range of reasons. My desktop isn't always running Linux for example, or even from the same partition always, and to run something 24/7 I need to host it not on my for-work desktop. I also run some less trusted software on separate server and network than say Home Assistant and Frigate.
Sure, I suppose. And I do have a separate computer for HA, because I consider it part of the house.in a way that is simply deserving of (cheap!) dedicated hardware.
But most of my multi-os stuff happens with VMs these days.
After I spent a few years successfully running Windows as my primary desktop OS, as a virtual machine (with its own dedicated CPU cores and accessories like GPU), the lines between separate computers and different operating systems permanently became very blurry to me.
By fsflover 2025-10-278:11 > most of my multi-os stuff happens with VMs these days
Sounds like you could be interested in Qubes OS, which runs everything in VMs by default with an amazing UI. (My daily driver.)
As "lightweight" as it is, you don't even need Plex or a "media server" software. My "media server" has been "files on an NFS share" which has worked for me for the last 15-20 years.
By leptons 2025-10-277:58 SMB share is the minimum viable. Plex on an android TV device is a lot better. Access to all the media with a simple remote has been a great experience.
By ssl-3 2025-10-2618:06 Oh, I also use SMB for that. A local file share is more than enough for anyone who lives alone, in a cave, and who never has never physically interacted with another person -- and who never wants to.
Plex, meanwhile? It is much more approachable by the lays.
My elderly mother can watch my media with a cheap little Roku box while she sits on the sofa at her house many miles away with a remote control in her hand, using Plex.
By trenchpilgrim 2025-10-2717:11 Value adds I get from Jellyfin:
- Each member of my family gets their watch progress individually tracked down to how many minutes they made it into each video, across devices.
- The server's GPU automatically transcodes video into the best format for the device, display resolution, and available bandwidth. Very helpful for streaming stuff off the home server while away from home to optimize battery life and bandwidth.
- Automatically pulling subtitles from opensubtitles. Very handy if you have a multingual family who enjoys foreign media shows together. The paid streaming services are mostly abysmal at subtitling.
- A soft reason: My family members are seriously impressed by how nice the web UI is compared to Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, etc. It's literally opened their eyes to how software doesn't have to be bad - capitalism makes software bad over time.
By wsatb 2025-10-2617:02 Yep. Piracy getting popular is the market telling you something is seriously wrong. The system is currently broken with tens of services each coming in at $10+ per month (and seemingly increasing every quarter).
By freefaler 2025-10-2620:09 I'm waiting for TorrentCoin to pay/earn while you're watching/seeding to occur and then the pirating will become profitable and open the flood of dedicated for profit pirates from less regulated parts of the world. When this happens (it's sorta happening right now with Real Debrid & etc...) there will be a napster moment for movies and streaming.
By listenallyall 2025-10-278:33 I think the explanation is less about greed and more that ad-supported programming is almost always the only viable economic model. Cable worked brilliantly because everybody paid for a full range of channels, sure YOU only watched about 8 of them but other people had a totally different 8. Some channels survived many many years without earning any subscriber fees, just getting the distribution was enough and the ads paid the bills.
Anyone thinking that paid streaming subscriptions could entirely replace ad-supported for the long-term, never really thought it all through in my opinion.
> Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.
I've been doing a lot more digital purchasing. Like movies and TV shows. I know there is some risk to the services shutting down. But Disney's MoviesAnywhere mitigates that some.
I typically buy stuff when it is on sale. Generally a digital movie is (way) cheaper than a single ticket at a theater. And I've kinda built a decent sized library where I usually can find something to watch.
And, generall, my library is way better than Netflix at any given time. (Though I still have a couple(!) streaming subscriptions...)
By gchamonlive 2025-10-2616:52 > digital purchasing
That's an oxymoron if you can't have a local copy
By Dig1t 2025-10-275:33 Also I think the piracy experience has improved significantly. Jellyfin + Infuse makes the watching experience just as good, if not better than, the streaming apps. You get the same nice scrolling interface, trailers, automatic subtitles and it feels just as good as the Netflix app. Except it’s all the content you actually want, nothing you don’t, and there are no ads.
By ta1243 2025-10-2713:46 In the 90s we clamoured for being able to subscribe to what we want rather than a single
We broadly have that now.
I subscribe to Youtube, Spotify, Netflix, Disney, Apple, Paramount, BBC. Only Apple and BBC force adverts on me, and Apple I'll be cancelling because of it. I keep BBC more out of moral reasons as I think it's a net good for the UK.
The monthly cost is very reasonable to me, inflation wise its about the same as I paid for BBC and Sky in the 90s.
Last night we wanted to watch the 2012 Les Mis film, £3.50 to rent it from Apple. In the 90s, inflation adjusted, it cost £8 to rent the tape.
If I can subscribe to watch something without adverts, I will. If I can buy or rent it, I will.
If I can't do that though, then I'll get it elsewhere.
By mrtksn 2025-10-278:52 We used to share passwords but as the streaming services begin the crackdown started cancelling the services and just use pirated movie watching sites.
Funny enough, our TCL Smart TV has an UI that shows trending movies etc. and when you click on these it just does a web search with the relevant words to find pirate websites. The browser is also able to detect video streams and asks you if you want to just play the video in the video player. The overall experience is not too far away from the legal streaming platforms.
Most new films are a trash anyway, so I don't think I feel moral dilemma either. In fact, if the streaming services go away this will be a net win for the movie industry.
By pjmlp 2025-10-278:06 I rather keep myself to a single service, I don't suffer from FOMO, do not need to see everything.
If ads get too much, then I just shut it off, books don't have ads, and the local library has enough audio books and DVDs to keep me busy on rainy weekends.
By toasterlovin 2025-10-272:02 From the point of view of content owners, an moderate amount of piracy is ideal, since it implies that they’re extracting maximum value from everyone who isn’t pirating.
By wilg 2025-10-271:01 It's not extortion for them to charge money for you to watch TV shows, at historically low prices.
By trymas 2025-10-278:05 Also some streaming services are not available at some countries or only sold as some bundles with only particular ISPs or cable providers in that country.
Hence you cannot buy it legally even if you wished (to change your ISP).
By tmaly 2025-10-2721:12 I love paying the extra for Paramount+ on Amazon Prime to avoid the ads only to find out that does not include Paramount ads.
By dmix 2025-10-2617:02 I also started torrenting again after I got tired of the quality of streaming content. But I still use Youtube all the time.
By m463 2025-10-272:58 I focus a lot on 4k, bluray and dvds. Shuffling physical media is nice.
Small used cd/dvd stores like rasputin are a delight.
If life gets busy, you pause without racking up subscription fees.
Also - there is something deliberate about choosing and watching a movie physically. You buy it deliberately, and later you play it more deliberately.
When I had netflix, I could spend the time to watch a movie doomscrolling through not-that-great stuff to not watch.
By softwaredoug 2025-10-2616:503 reply My personal theory on this is prestige TV is in a recession.
After Game of thrones season 8, people wonder why they should invest into a show when there’s a high chance it won’t pay off. Even for a good show it can feel like work. That plus the high cost for studios and over abundance of supply, meant studios pulled back.
Instead we’re seeing a reemergence of low effort TV. And YouTube plays nicely into that.
At some point this pendulum may swing back (remember in 2000s when everything was low effort reality TV).
> After Game of thrones season 8, people wonder why they should invest into a show when there’s a high chance it won’t pay off.
GoT was going downhill way before the final season. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by investing in a show. TV watching should be enjoyable, you dont have to watch things you dont like hoping for a payoff later on.
By softwaredoug 2025-10-2620:07 When I see a show has 2 seasons (like Andor) and it’s finished. And I see it’s well reviewed I’m definitely in. The creators thought out a compete arc.
When a (non episodic) show is in 3 out of ?? seasons even if everything is good so far, I’m now skeptical. Not just GoT but shows like Westworld leave me wondering if I wasted my time.
By Izkata 2025-10-2721:27 Being "invested in a show" is using "invested" in a slightly different sense than monetary investments. It's not hoping for a payoff later, it means the show has already caught your attention and you actively want to see the next episode, that you're excited for it.
Many people (myself included) enjoy TV shows that have an ongoing story. Ideally we want that story to come to a satisfying end, eventually. It's disappointing when, after watching it for tens or hundreds of hours, the team behind the show delivers a sub-par ending, or no real ending at all.
Sure, there are lots of episodic shows out there where each episode can be enjoyed (or not) on its own, and if the show starts going downhill, you can just stop watching, and it's not that big a deal.
> you dont have to watch things you dont like hoping for a payoff later on.
No, but it's disappointing when I watch something I do like for years, and then the payoff never materializes. Sure, that doesn't erase the enjoyment of watching it over those years, but not getting that payoff feels like leaving us hanging off a ledge.
By netsharc 2025-10-279:59 I wonder how the GoT writers couldn't see that they were blowing it with season 8 (is it even the whole season, or just the last 2 episodes).
Some commenters rationalize that Daenarys was always going to lose her shit, but the way it was handled in "that episode" was very unsatisfactory. I guess the writers wrote themselves into a corner because they had to work with what they've already broadcast, unlike a book author who can go back and rewrite plenty of stuff across the book when they find they need to establish something for the climax...
By mortsnort 2025-10-2715:11 https://www.statsignificant.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-tvs-g...
This is a pretty well known fact. Netflix is the best example. They created the prestige streaming market with House of Cards, and now they're primarily using algorithms to create low-cost reality shows and cheap disaster documentaries.
YouTube has a ton of decent effort content. Like it’s not nearly as expensive as traditional TV episodes but it’s not total slop.
I can watch hour long videos of people building impressive projects, engineering products, performing interesting tests, etc. The kind of content you never would have got on traditional TV.
By tguedes 2025-10-2815:12 Do you have recommendations? I've been struggling to find a good one since Outdoor Boys shut down.
My youtube experience:
- open video
- 2 unskippable ads
- click somewhere in the video to skip the creator's sponsor section (more ads)
- 2 more unskippable ads
- video plays, the original audio was automagically replaced by a dogshit 1995 tier "ai" dub
- it's not the part I wanted to see, click somewhere else
- 2 more unskippable ads
At that point I spent 5 minutes watching ads and forgot why I came here...
My experience - ublock lite. Haven't seen an add for ages. Watch two seconds of creator's sponsor section then skip to next bit.
By majora2007 2025-10-2717:21 Add sponsorblock to skip those sections automatically as well.
By EZ-E 2025-10-2710:49 Youtube is squeezing more and more to push subscribing to premium. Youtube is where "everything" is - they know they can squeeze hard, where else are you going to go?
Ironically it looks more and more like TV with the non stop ads and sponsors.
By world2vec 2025-10-2710:58 Either pay for their Premium service or use uBlock Origin (Firefox) + SponsorBlock. Otherwise YouTube is unusable.
By bestouff 2025-10-279:05 Use the Force .. err use Newpipe
By theonething 2025-10-2715:49 try Brave browser
