• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, December 19, 2025

The whole system is breaking down.

That was the Seinfeldian reaction I had when I heard the news that YouTube had wrested the rights to the Oscars away from Disney.

It was announced on Wednesday: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and YouTube struck a deal for the video website to have exclusive rights to the Oscars -- and ancillary events such as red-carpet coverage, behind-the-scenes content and Governors Ball access -- starting in 2029 through 2033.

Under the terms of the deal, the Oscars will air live and for free on both YouTube and YouTube TV.

ABC has carried the annual Oscar show since 1976. One story I read in the trades yesterday said “the amount of money that the Academy was looking for and the amount that YouTube was willing to pay didn’t make sense for Disney.” And that’s that.

But what does it all mean? Owned by Google (Alphabet Corp.), YouTube straddles the globe. It is easily available to all, and should provide no problem for anyone who wants to watch the Oscars.

Normally, I would be the last one to apply the word “glamor” to describe ABC, but there is something about the Oscars that brought a little glamor to ABC, and network TV in general, every year.

By contrast, YouTube is not glamorous and never will be. By YouTube’s own estimate, it now has 20 billion videos and averages 70 billion views every day.

When discussing YouTube, people used to denigrate it as the home of funny cat videos and young men hurling themselves painfully to the pavement from bike and skateboard experiments gone awry.

That’s not fair, of course, but suffice it to say that YouTube has everything under the sun for every taste and purpose.

But “The Oscars” is such a worldwide, global brand that it will not become just another video offering in the vast YouTube sea. It will stand out.

Even after taking all of that into account, it is sometimes still difficult to think of YouTube as anything other than “just a website,” as if “TV network” represents something more.

Now, we are heading toward a time when people might say “ABC is just a TV network,” and YouTube is something more, which it is. 

What this deal really represents is another milestone in the migration of live-event content from traditional TV to streaming/digital, where the Oscars join live sports already in the process of migrating -- most notably, NFL games (Amazon Prime and Netflix) and NBA games, which NBC is now sharing with co-owned Peacock.

The year 2029 is just four years away. I wonder what network TV, or TV in general, will look like by then?