It’s been a very weird week for New Media organizations attempting to shove Old Media institutions down their gullets, with most of the oxygen in that particular space being taken up by Netflix’s ambitious, and now apparently very real, plans to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for itself. But it’s not the only story, as Variety reports this week on an unlikely contender in a brewing battle to see who the next long-term broadcast host for The Oscars might end up being: YouTube.
See, it’s getting close to when the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences has to work out a new broadcast contract for its annual Academy Awards, as the current one (with ABC, and which will carry the ceremony through its 100th anniversary) wraps up in 2028. Early reports that Netflix and CBS might be interested in the fight have now faded, but it’s left what are apparently three serious contenders in place: ABC, which has hosted the Oscars for the vast majority of its television history; NBCUniversal, whose NBC was the first network to ever broadcast the event, and which would love to jam the Oscars together with its 2028 Los Angeles Olympics coverage; and the Google-owned online video service, YouTube. Which, as Variety‘s analysis points out, already profits pretty heavily from the yearly event, because basically any time anything actually interesting happens during the show, the whole country ditches the host network and races to YouTube’s servers to see the clip. So why not make it a formal arrangement?
(It’s worth noting that last year marked the first-ever online broadcast of the show, as Disney’s Hulu ran the event parallel with ABC. Meanwhile, Disney inadvertently underscored what a huge presence YouTube has become in TV earlier this year when it got into that big, ugly carriage fight with the service.)
Per the prevailing analysis, the final winner in the competition is going to be determined on strictly economic lines, i.e., “Who’s willing to hand over the biggest stack of cash for the honor?” Sources quoted in the Variety piece state that ABC spends about $120 million per year on the Oscars, which is the kind of number we don’t really like to look at head-on, lest life-threatening shock set in. But it’s also true that the show’s ratings are not what they used to be; after steadily dropping in the 2010s, they crashed and burned during the pandemic lockdowns, and have only risen back slowly in the years since. (Notably, they actually dipped a bit with this year’s show, suggesting we might have hit a plateau.) All three “actively interested” parties in the bidding are well aware of those numbers, and are apparently extremely leery of over-paying for the annual spectacle.
