YouTube Isn’t Quite TV, But It’s Probably What Comes Next

So it seems that people are watching over 400 million hours of podcasts monthly on their TV sets or “living room devices” as YouTube euphemistically referred to them in their latest update. 

No footnote on that stat to indicate it was anything other than “grading our own homework” but this is one I feel I can trust them on.

Many people (and I include myself in that bucket) did not see this coming, podcasts being something that seemed to be the province of lengthy car trips and/or lengthy dog walks. 

But upon reflection, it makes sense, in that you can turn on the TV, the device most people default to for background noise, put on a podcast and then go make dinner, clean the kitchen, check your email—and not have to actually worry about missing something because you are really just listening, not watching.

Now admittedly there is a mental shift when you actually see the people you’ve spent years listening to on camera. I remember the dissonance the first time I saw a video of a Howard Stern Show broadcast back in the 90s. Yes, I had seen photos of Stern, Robin Quivers and the crew, but seeing them live, in a studio, with headphones on, was very different. Sort of how Dorothy must have felt when she finally saw the Wizard.

But what is most notable about those 400 million hours is not that people are watching podcasts. Rather, it is that those 400 million hours are hours they are not watching what we traditionally think of as “TV.”

Is YouTube TV?

Ever since Nielsen’s The Gauge first started putting out ratings that showed YouTube beating out Netflix in terms of viewing on actual television sets, there’s been a fierce debate raging about whether YouTube is actually “TV.”

Google, of course, argues that it is, while the media companies and the VAB argue that it most decidedly is not.

And here’s the rub: they’re both right.

YouTube is not TV in the way we’ve thought of it over the past 75 years. But it is likely the next evolution of TV even if they themselves are not yet aware of it.

To understand this shift, it helps to be aware of YouTube’s origins. Which was as a site that would give young Silicon Valley workers a way to share videos of their children with their families across the globe.

And for a short while that is what it was—internet speeds were painfully slow, video quality was painfully low, and the promise of seeing video of your grandkids was the only reason anyone even bothered.

That quickly changed however, as speeds improved along with video quality and soon YouTube was home to a new species known as “User Generated Content” or UGC for short.

Early UGC was mostly limited to short GIF-like videos of charming cats, surprised rodents and other shorts that did not require much bandwidth. 

That then evolved into MTV-style “confessional” content where creators brought you into their lives, showed you how to apply make-up or let you join them in playing video games. (Looking at you, PewDiePie.)

Pro-Am was the next evolution—web series created by people with “pro” (e.g. Hollywood) credentials, who understood the benefits of high production value but where the episodes were somewhat shorter than your average sitcom.

That’s sort of where we are today, only throw in that YouTube now has TikTok style “Shorts” along with a fairly sizable library of actual Hollywood TV series on a part of the site that can be all but impossible to find on mobile.

Ditto a sizable collection of movies for rent (versus the pirated ones with Portuguese or Thai subtitles that proliferate across the site.) Something we all learned about ten years ago when the Seth Rogan/James Franco vehicle The Interview made its debut on YouTube and then promptly forgot.

Point being that YouTube is a whole lot of things these days and while it may not be what we typically think of as “television” it is rapidly replacing the hours we once spent watching television and thus can be best thought of as “what comes after television” or “TV 2.0”

What Is TV 2.0?

YouTube’s interface is more than a bit chaotic compared to traditional TV, in that it is a lot more personalized to the interests of each particular user. So rather than "Drama", "Comedy" and “Romance” you might see categories like “Memes”, “Accents” and “Mascara.” (Okay, I made that last one up, but it’s possible.)

There’s little standardization within each category either, as everything from three hour podcasts to three minute how-to videos might show up. Which is fine with users—part of YouTube’s appeal is the variety of options it gives you—but can be confusing to advertisers who like having more stability in their TV budgets and are particularly wedded to the idea of running their high production value commercials against high production value programming.

One YouTube To Rule Them All?

What YouTube offers is a glimpse of where all of the other media companies are eventually headed—an array of content options encompassing everything from short form clips to long-form podcasts to big budget dramas to movies, live sports and events. 

Whether the ad industry at large will eventually adopt YouTube’s “skip” model is a column for another day, but there will definitely be ads as part of the monetization model and advertisers will definitely pay to be associated with the more popular programming, whatever form that programming takes.

Smarter media companies will not only go the YouTube route, but will create an alternate interface that looks and feels more like TV 1.0, with broader genre categories that mimic the ones that exist today plus actual linear channels. Because there will still be an audience for that and because viewers and advertisers don’t easily change their ways.

Like everything in TV, the change will be gradual—think ten years or more—and not overnight, but eventually it will change because, if nothing else, there are only so many hours in a day and the fantasy that somehow audiences can be convinced to go back to sitting down in front of the TV and watching the equivalent of a network prime time line-up every single night is just that—a fantasy. As is the financial planning that seems to accompany that fantasy.

The world changes and eventually TV changes along with it. Which is why today’s YouTube is likely a lot closer to tomorrow’s television than the industry is prepared to acknowledge.

Those podcast viewers, though? They are definitely on to something.