We are betting that you did not have “The Oscars® Telecast Moves Off ABC” on your media news bingo card for 2025. We are doubling down on that same bet that you absolutely, positively did NOT have “The Oscars® Telecast Moves to YouTube” on that same bingo card for 2025.

Not even for 2029, which is when it will actually happen, according to today’s breaking news.

This headline is now going to play out a couple of different ways; you just watch.

One version will be that the audience for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ annual award show has been eroding over the years, and Disney/ABC was probably not too willing to swallow a bigger price tag to carry the show past its 100th edition in 2028 (which would be the final year it would not be on ABC). The details there are that the Oscars® telecast drew about 20 million viewers in the US this year, up about 1% from 2024. The show has been slowly recovering from its low-water mark in 2021, when it garnered only 10.4 million viewers during the pandemic.

Even if you give the “Covid exemption” for the 2021 ratings, the Oscars are still far below the 30 million or so viewers that watched on average during the 2010s. (But then again, so is most everything on broadcast television—except, of course, for live sports events.)

Still, a single program that attracts the largest non-Sports audience is nothing to sneeze at. The Oscars® telecast usually has some newsworthiness beyond its typical three and a half hours on a Sunday night in late February or early March. Why would Disney/ABC pass on continuing to air a significant annual television event, one that it has had for decades?

Which brings us to a second version of how this story plays out: That streaming is now eating up everything on TV.

That premise isn’t wrong in our book. But it might be a bit too narrow a viewpoint.

YouTube and its owner, Google/Alphabet, have very deep pockets. It dropped $2 billion in 2023 to take the NFL’s “Sunday Ticket” package away from DirecTV, which had carried that premium pay-TV package (sorry for the alliteration) since it began. Streaming rivals Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Peacock have all scored the rights to individual NFL games on their streaming platforms. (Remember that, when you can’t find the NFL games on your TV on Christmas Day. They will be on Netflix.)

A big-ticket item like The Oscars® is a solid get for YouTube. And actually a good partner for the Academy who puts on the event. The Oscars® are just one of a series of awards programs that the Academy puts on each year. YouTube will carry all of those, with no worries about how long they might go or how many commercial breaks can be crammed into each show.

And did we mention that YouTube will deliver these to a global audience? One deal, one platform, and the Academy gets exposure wherever it might want.

Plus, you don’t have to take a host from whatever broadcast network might be carrying your marquee event(s). (To be fair, we thought Jimmy Kimmel was just fine as the host of The Oscars®. Not in the league of Carson or Crystal, but who else would be?)

Another storyline that is likely to play out is whether the departure of The Oscars® from broadcast television signals the watershed moment when streaming surpassed the place in our culture that the legacy medium of television once held. We aren’t jumping on that bandwagon because we see too much behavior that suggests, for many viewers, YouTube is just another channel that appears as an icon on the home screen of their big-screen television.

Is this a big deal? Of course it is. Much will be written and speculated about the move long before the first presenters say “and The Oscar® goes to” on YouTube in 2029. That is over three years away at this point.

Just think of how many bingo squares will get filled in between now and then. We hope you have one of those paint markers that the seasoned bingo pros use down at the local senior center.

They are as ruthless as any media executives working today.

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