In the early days of the internet, we virtual Neanderthals had no other choice but to watch our videos on thick computer monitors. If we wanted to see the latest Smosh sketch or Newgrounds animation, our only was to boot up our screeching dial-up internet and hope there was enough bandwidth to get through the whole video.
You’d need a clever workaround to watch anything digital on your clunky CRT television. I still remember putting in a disc to play Netflix on my Wii, and if I wanted to watch YouTube, I’d have to go to the XL web page in the Wii’s terrible-to-use browser. But after two decades of viewer and distributor evolution, it’s now easier than ever to just boot up your favorite video on the largest screen in your home.
According to a Dec. 11 blog by YouTube, in 2024, users watched over one billion hours of content daily on their televisions. That’s a lot, but it’s still dwarfed by YouTube Shorts, which the company announced last year gets around 70 billion daily views, and everyone knows that phones are still the best way to view short-form content.
Still, YouTube has started to take over types of content that dominated television in the past. Over 400 million hours of podcasts are listened to monthly on YouTube, according to YouTube’s newest post. Meanwhile, cable television continues on a downward viewership slope.
According to the NY Times, MSNBC viewership has fallen 53 percent since October 2024, and people are getting their news from alternative media sources. According to the Pew Research Center, 54 percent of U.S. adults get at least some of their news from social media, with 32 percent of adults regularly getting their news from YouTube.
Sports and kids’ shows, which were always on my television when I was growing up, are now mainstays of YouTube. YouTube’s latest blog post says that sports watch time has been growing 30 percent year over year, though it doesn’t specify if that means football games or any content with a sports star. (MrBeast meeting Cristiano Ronaldo got 54 million views, potentially raising the average.)
Children’s content has been a highly contentious subject on YouTube, with regulations slowly changing the landscape of what’s allowed. But hang around parents of young children long enough, and you are bound to see a Ms Rachel video streamed. According to YouTube’s blog, her channel had the “highest watch times on TVs across YouTube channels in the last year.”
YouTube has been pushing television viewership hard this year. At the latest Made on YouTube event, it announced a new menu designed to be navigated on TV screens and QR codes viewers can scan for links.
Technology continues to consume our lives in ways that weren’t possible when we were all playing Wii Sports. Television has been rotting minds since Howdy Doody (Google it), and YouTube’s television takeover is not at all surprising.
