YouTube Still Isn’t TV, Tubi Is The Super Bowl MVP
1. YouTube Still Isn’t TV
You will, by now, have read at least a dozen articles and seen a half dozen videos (videos are hot on LinkedIn right now) about YouTube’s announcement that right now, at this moment, in these United States, there are more people watching YouTube on television than on their phones.
Most of these takes will involve the author telling you that this is proof that YouTube is indeed television.
Don’t believe them.
It is not.
YouTube is its own beast. An evolution of the video medium that is watched on the same device, but also one that is markedly different in many ways.
Think dogs and wolves.
Why It Matters
If there was ever an entity for which the Indian parable of the Seven Blind Men and the Elephant was apt, it is YouTube.
Which encompasses everything from Hollywood movies (both bootlegged versions with Portuguese subtitles and rentable studio ones) to how-to and cat videos.
So many people tend to view YouTube through their own lens, based on how they most commonly use it.
But it is the fact that it is so many things to so many people that makes it “Not TV.”
Or at least TV in the year 2025.
I am perfectly willing to accept that in 2045, “TV” will much more closely resemble YouTube. In fact, I’d be surprised if it didn’t.
So Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, not wolves and dogs.
But back to why YouTube is not TV in 2025 despite both being video-centric mediums that are watched on the same device.
And that is because people watch them for different reasons and have different expectations from them.
TV is, to use, McLuhan’s taxonomy, a hot medium. This is, of course, not how he initially classified it. But the low-res early TV of the 1960s was very different than the TV of today.
To better understand this argument, remember that McLuhan classified cinema as a hot medium because it was more of a lean-back experience. [In McLuhan-world, a hot medium is immersive and information-rich, while a cool medium requires more user participation both in filling in the story and in interacting with it].
And I’d argue that the bulk of TV in 2025 is very much a “hot” lean-back experience, especially when compared to the TV of the 1960s. Or to YouTube.
Fewer Blanks To Fill In. McLuhan’s classification of TV as a cool medium rested on the fact that much was left to the imagination on TV, largely due to social mores of the 60s. So no sex scenes. Not much actual violence. Whereas today’s TV is more akin to cinema in its story-telling.
A big part of this is the shift that happened about 20 years ago with the demise of the previously held diktat that viewers should be able to jump into any episode of a series and figure out what was going on. Lost, for instance, was a sequential story and you would indeed be lost unless you started at the beginning.
The higher resolution of today’s TVs plays a big role here too—back in the 60s, the fidelity gap between TV and film was massive. Today they are on par and screens are easily twice if not three times as large.
No Longer Communal. Ad-free TV and the on-demand nature of streaming also help to make TV more like film than it was in the 1960s. People watch series in their own bubbles, no conversation and interaction in the moment, or even the buzz that weekly series once provided. Bingeing only amplified that, by allowing an even more cinematic or “hot” style experience.
YouTube, by contrast, is very much a cool medium. Or at least many parts of YouTube.
It is interactive in that viewers leave comments and that the algorithm plays a much less important role than it does on, say, TikTok, so viewers need to be more active, or interactive, about their choice of what to watch next.
The nature of many YouTube shows, which is far more personal and intimate, also serves to make it more of a cool medium.
Viewers may get involved in the mishegoss of the Real Housewives, but there’s a remove, a distance. These are women on TV. Versus a Creator with a more personal v-log style show, where the viewer is drawn in much more intimately and where there is an expectation (of sorts) that the Creator will see and react to viewer comments.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are a TV network or streaming service, realize that it doesn’t really matter whether Alan Wolk thinks YouTube is TV or not. People are watching YouTube instead of whatever it is you are putting out, much in the way they are watching TikTok, listening to podcasts, playing video games and posting on Reddit instead of watching whatever it is that you are putting out.
And that the younger they are, the more likely it is that they are doing these other things.
So react. Think about what elements from YouTube you can incorporate into your own platform. Imitation can be the most sincere form of flattery and for an industry that rolled out dozens of fantasy shows because viewers liked Game Of Thrones, it should not really be a problem.
If you are an ad agency, realize that viewers don’t consciously think about what form of media they are consuming and whether or not they are interacting with it enough to classify as a cool medium. They’re just there for the entertainment, and so you want to be sure that you do not overwhelm them with the same messages across all their various platforms, lest they become sick of you. Or, to put it more simply, cross-platform/omnichannel is real and you need to make it a priority.
If you are Google, stop stressing over whether anyone thinks you are TV or not. Rather, think about how your ad platform works in a world where it’s mostly being seen on a giant HD TV screen. You have the wind at your back and soon enough TV companies will be proclaiming they are just like YouTube. You just need to wait them out.
2. Tubi Is The Super Bowl MVP
The Eagles' Jalen Hurts may have won the actual MVP award, but there’s little doubt in the TV industry that Tubi won the Super Bowl hands down.
Fox’s popular free TV service became even more popular by pretty much flawlessly streaming a 4K feed of the game. They also provided a way for an entire generation to watch the game without having to borrow their parents' cable password. And had what was easily one of the most memorable ad campaigns of the game. (Love it or hate it, you are not going to forget that cowboy hat head.)
Why It Matters
Tubi is in an enviable position among FAST services. Because Fox does not have a subscription service, Tubi is Fox’s only child, if you will. Meaning Fox can shower it with love, including the rights to stream the Super Bowl. Something it likely would not have done if it also had, say, a subscription streaming service of its own. Then Tubi would be the little sibling and those rights would have gone to the SVOD team faster than you can say L.I.X.
Tubi is already quite popular for a streaming service, free or otherwise, at least according to Nielsen’s The Gauge, whose December 2024 numbers had it beating out Peacock, Paramount+ and Max.
Tubi has taken a unique approach among FAST services by emphasizing its on-demand library over linear channels. In fact, the service claims that 90% of its viewership is on demand.
This matters for a number of reasons, but key among them is that other services now seem to be following suit. If there was one content-related bit of takeaway I had from CES this year, it is that all of the FASTs are looking to up their on-demand game.
Tubi has also focused on original series, or series that are original to the US market, series aimed at a diverse and younger audience, such as Big Mood, starring Nicola Coughlan of Bridgerton and Derry Girls fame.
So that’s who Tubi is.
Last Sunday though, they were responsible for 13.6 million views, with a peak of 15.5 million concurrent streams and an overall total of 24 million unique viewers across all of their Game Day activities.
Those are impressive numbers—a 60% bump in streaming viewership from last year—but if I were Tubi, the number I’d be most proud of would be their winning 26-second streaming delay lag.
If you will recall, the massive delay on streaming had been a real issue during previous Super Bowls. In the early years it could be as long as two minutes, meaning that anyone following on social media learned about touchdowns and field goals long before they appeared on their TV.
Fox appears to have solved this by allowing Tubi to stream the feed directly from the network rather than from one of their affiliates, as the vMVPDs did.
It worked though, and that’s a huge win for sports on streaming overall.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are Fox and Tubi, take a bow. You made some very smart moves and scored a big win. Just don’t rest on your laurels. You need to motivate all those people who watched the game on Tubi to watch some more.
I mean it’s not like you don’t have their emails…
If you are Comcast, you are up next. You’ve got Peacock and Xumo and a whole world of experience streaming the Olympics, using the medium’s digital nature to add additional features. More people will be streaming the game next year too—that’s a given. So make sure to give them something that will wow them.
If you’re a fan, rejoice. This is all good news, especially the lag time part. Which given the amount of time you’re soon going to be spending watching sports on streaming, is no small thing.
