Hollywood’s big open secret is that YouTube is dominating television. In July of 2024, the company broke two major Nielsen records — becoming the first streaming platform to top the Media Distributor Gauge chart, which measures TV usage by media company; and becoming the first streamer to exceed 10% of total TV usage in a single month.
This move to the living room is one that CEO Neal Mohan takes seriously.
“As you know, the environment in the living room is incredibly dynamic. In fact, in my career, I haven’t seen it ever to be as dynamic as it is today,” Mohan said during the 2024 Made on YouTube event in New York City. “We recognize that we have a really important role in that environment. Audiences increasingly, especially young audiences, when they turn on the TV, they’re turning on YouTube. That really is their experience in the living room.”
Back in February, Mohan wrote in a blog post that he sees the living room as the “next frontier” for YouTube. The company has taken major steps to expand its role in this space, from broadcasting events like Coachella to partnerships like the NFL Sunday Ticket, which is now in its second season on the platform. During the event, Mohan also revealed that creator earnings that come from living room viewing have grown 30%, year over year. In an effort to keep expanding this frontier, YouTube announced it will be dividing its creators channels into seasons and episodes, a model that emulates other streaming services. Also, interactive elements such as replacing links with QR codes and redesigning the Subscribe button have been optimized to work better on televisions.
“We also want to harness the unique capabilities you get with a large screen for that cinematic quality when consuming longer format content. That’s our dual-pronged approach to continue to make sure that we are the leading platform,” Mohan concluded.
Though YouTube is currently leading the charge in home viewing, the company doesn’t necessarily see their streaming peers as competitors. This is largely because, as a distributor, the company has a close working relationship with every single major player in the TV landscape.
“We’re super proud of the 10% threshold that we just crossed, and our partners are excited about that also,” Mary Ellen Coe, YouTube’s chief business officer, told TheWrap in a roundtable that also included Deadline. “Disney, Netflix, they’re really close partners, and they like to use our services to promote their content and to window things.”
Despite its unique position as both competitor and partner, Coe assured journalists that the company is more focused on reflecting what consumers are most excited to watch rather than prioritizing partner content.
“Really, we focus on what’s the viewer excited about? How do we make sure that we’re providing a breadth of content across all of these formats?” Coe said. “Shorts, music and longform are all growing double digits in the living room. So we worry less about who we’re competing with, and we’re always thinking about how do we give them access to that incredible growth and distribution as well?”
Coe pointed to Michelle Khare, a YouTube influencer who has 4.72 million subscribers. When her channel was shown at Made on YouTube as an example of the service’s new season and episode sorting system, Coe saw the creator take a picture of it.
“I think that is kind of why we do this,” Coe said. “Ultimately, we’re a platform to give [creators] a voice and to really let them tell their stories in all the ways that are possible, whether that be on Shorts or whether that be in the living room.”
The season and episode sorter were far from the only innovations YouTube unveiled during the event. The company also showcased several new AI products for creators. On the YouTube Shorts side, the company will be integrating Google DeepMind’s video generation software Veo into its background generation tool Dream Screen. That means creators will be able to generate video backgrounds using AI. Also on the Shorts side, the company is rolling out an AI music generation tool for instrumental tracks to help creators who use royalty-free music. YouTube is also introducing an Inspiration Tab in the YouTube Studio, which will allow creators to brainstorm ideas for videos using generative AI, and is expanding its auto-dubbing option, which currently supports English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, among other languages.
“AI is everyone’s job now,” Coe joked, adding that it “permeates everything.” Because of this sharp focus on the emerging technology, the company is taking care to ensure that its AI tools are as ethical as possible.
“We built the technology to be able to identify, ‘Actually this is mimicking or very closely resembling something that exists.’ We don’t want you to recreate things that already exist and might be the IP of others,” Amjad Hanif, VP of product management and fan funding at YouTube, said during the roundtable that included TheWrap. “Really, the onus is on these creators to use that discretion on what they create and what they put out, although we have some safeguards around things that we don’t want tools to be used for. That line is always a bit blurry and is something that we’re working on defining.”
All AI-created assets will contain a label that indicates to viewers that the content was synthetically generated. Additionally, there will be a way to flag and report inappropriate AI content to YouTube.
To develop these oversights, YouTube has been working closely with top names in creative industries. One of the best examples of this is Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s global head of music, who spent what Coe described as “an incredible amount of time” with the CEOs of major music labels to construct guidelines and practices around music AI usage. Cohen’s main priority is to reduce the workload of what he dubs “exhausted” artists and to connect them more easily with fans.
“Copyright law, of course, didn’t contemplate Gen AI. That’s why we’re working so closely with our partners to come up with some principles and to understand how do we actually work together to do copyright 2.0 together?” Cohen said at the roundtable. “That’s still to come. But in the meanwhile, we need to experiment, we need to be bold, we need to be innovative, and we need to work together to come up with the ideas of how to protect songwriters and artists.”
This collaboration between the artist community and product has already resulted in some interesting innovations. Case in point? An expansion of Content ID that allows YouTube’s platform partners to detect and manage AI-generated singing content that simulates existing artists’ singing voices.
“A lot of our investments are on things that we know are going to be important for the long term of the ecosystem. So things like matching and identification, the ability to control how you could monetize this content, those are all things that — irrespective of the zig and zag of Gen AI — will be important years from now,” Hanif explained. “They’re things that we’re going to take years to build and refine, and so we do put a lot of energy into where we’re heading, versus trying to react to the news cycle. Every once in a while, we get surprised by something and we have a large team that’s able to react to it.”
When it comes to Generative AI, Coe also noted that it’s important to remember that YouTube is a global platform. “We spend a lot of time with our policy teams working with governments to understand how they’re thinking about the regulations evolving, et cetera. So it’s really important that we’re in the market, working closely with people who are shaping and understanding how they’re thinking about the evolution of protections and responsibility,” she concluded.
