The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a major shift in how the Oscars will be broadcast, striking an exclusive five‑year deal to move the Oscars to YouTube starting in 2029, beginning with the 101st ceremony. The move repositions the world’s biggest Hollywood night around global streaming rather than traditional television. It also signals the end of the ceremony’s long-standing partnership with ABC as its U.S. home, a relationship that spans decades and is slated to last only through the 100th ceremony in 2028, before the new arrangement takes effect.
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In the accompanying statement, the Academy framed the YouTube deal as a matter of reach and access rather than a simple platform swap, casting the move as a way to push Oscar content far beyond the confines of a single American broadcaster and toward a truly global, digitally engaged audience. The organization said the partnership is designed to broaden the audience that can watch and engage with its work, arguing the change will help the Academy meet viewers where they already are online and make its programming easier to discover, share, and rewatch across markets and time zones.
As the Academy explained:
“This partnership will allow us to broaden access to the Academy’s work to the widest possible audience worldwide.”
Betting on YouTube
For decades, the Oscars stood as one of the crown jewels of American television, yet their ratings have continued to drift downward as viewing habits evolved, with the most recent years showing only a partial rebound from a long, historic slide.
Data from Nielsen, cited by CBS News, show that the broadcast never dipped below 30 million viewers up until 2018, a stark contrast to the late-1990s peak of roughly 55 million.
The pandemic year of 2021 marked the low point, with about 10.4 million viewers. Even after a rebound, totals remain well below the franchise’s former peak, with roughly 19.5 million in 2024 and around 19.7 million in 2025 in the United States.
This prolonged decline has been one of the Academy’s core motivators for embracing YouTube: the platform’s global reach and younger ecosystem offer a way to reach audiences who no longer reliably show up for a long television event, especially as the Academy aims to turn the Oscars into a digital cultural moment defined by clips, creators, and on-demand viewing rather than a single linear broadcast night.
The agreement with YouTube fits into a broader rupture with the traditional television model that has persisted for decades, signaling a deeper transformation within Hollywood itself as studios and historic institutions confront an audience that has largely migrated online. Linear television—once the unquestioned arena for live prestige events—has gradually ceded ground, as streaming platforms position themselves not only as distributors but also as power brokers shaping culture, sports, and awards. This shift has been underscored by Netflix’s own ambitions to grow through large-scale acquisitions, and by reports linking Warner Bros. Discovery and HBO as long-term targets—scenarios that would have seemed unthinkable at the height of broadcast dominance. Taken together, these moves reflect an industry in flux, where tech platforms and traditional broadcasters are no longer mere helpers to Hollywood but rivals and, increasingly, its future stewards, pushing institutions like the Academy to adapt or risk becoming irrelevant in a media ecosystem defined less by networks and schedules and more by platforms, scale, and global reach.
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