Ending a 50 year partnership, the Oscars will move from ABC to YouTube, with the first ceremony to be streamed in 2029. There’s a big shift ahead for the Academy Awards. Ending a partnership that spans almost five decades, the Oscars are moving over to YouTube. The streaming service, owned by Google, is set to ... Oscars | YouTube will stream the Academy Awards from 2029 onwards
Ending a 50 year partnership, the Oscars will move from ABC to YouTube, with the first ceremony to be streamed in 2029.
There’s a big shift ahead for the Academy Awards. Ending a partnership that spans almost five decades, the Oscars are moving over to YouTube. The streaming service, owned by Google, is set to pay around $150m per year to screen the ceremony, with the first event landing on YouTube in 2029.
The Oscars have aired on the American Broadcasting Company – or ABC if you’re into the whole brevity thing – since 1976. The network – owned by Disney – had put in a bid to keep hold of the Oscars, but were roundly beaten by Google.
This will make the 2028 Oscars the last to be screened on ABC, with the ceremony moving over to YouTube the following year – which, on the upside, means that anyone with an internet connection should be able to watch it wherever they are on the planet.
A move to streaming could also theoretically mean that the Oscars are finally shown without edits; there was a tendency for less glamorous yet still important awards – Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, that sort of thing – to be left out of the televised show or cut short in order to reduce the running time.
The Oscars move is another significant win for streaming over traditional broadcasting networks, however, and a further sign of their increasing dominance over modern entertainment. Barring a late bidding war upset, it’s likely that Netflix will own Warner Bros within the next year or so, for example.
A report at Deadline suggests that it isn’t all glum faces at ABC, however, with its sources suggesting there’s a certain amount of ‘relief’ at the network, given how much the ceremony costs to run. Then again, this year’s ceremony had the highest ratings in five years, so there was clearly an upside to hosting the film industry’s biggest event.
Of the move, Academy CEO Bill Kramer and president Lynette Howell Taylor said in a statement, “This collaboration will leverage YouTube’s vast reach and infuse the Oscars and other Academy programming with innovative opportunities for engagement while honouring our legacy. We will be able to celebrate cinema, inspire new generations of filmmakers and provide access to our film history on an unprecedented global scale.”
We’re intrigued to see whether the Oscars will adapt to its new venue in 2029. We fully expect them to be hosted by PewDiePie, have mid-sentence interruptions for annoying diarrhea tablet adverts, and to end with a request to “smash that subscribe button.”
