The British public broadcaster BBC produces shows directly for YouTube. In January 2026 it signed a strategic partnership with the platform. In it, the BBC promises investment in new shows and is launching channels for children and young adults. For the documentary channel deepwatch, aimed at people aged 16 to 24, it commissions standalone documentaries.
Česká televize now publishes its podcasts and programmes on its own YouTube channel alongside its traditional broadcasting. Broadcasters long posted mainly what they had already aired. Some now make content for YouTube directly.
Pedro Pina, YouTube’s vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, summed up this shift in one sentence on 15 September. “There are moments in media when something quietly stops being a trend and starts being the room we are all standing in.” He added a link to a piece by Jasmine Dawson, senior vice president for digital at BBC Studios, titled “The year of YouTube: What happens when the side door becomes the front door?”
YouTube leads the US viewing charts
According to Nielsen’s July data, published on 10 September, YouTube took a record 14.2% of all US TV viewing time, more than any other distributor. Netflix had 7.8%. Streaming made up 49% of total viewing that month, more than cable and broadcast combined. In March YouTube had 13.2%, and in May it had 13.8%. YouTube itself describes the living room as the fastest-growing screen.
YouTube advises broadcasters to hire creators
At the MIPCOM television market in October 2025, Pina described the shift clearly. “It’s not a push mechanism anymore, it’s a pull mechanism,” he said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. For that reason, he argued, it is important to hire creators from YouTube. They understand that the job is “curating, taking care of your fandom”. In November 2025, YouTube launched a feature that lets creators organise episodes into series and shows. According to the platform, that makes viewing on a TV more convenient.
Bluey channels gained over 21 million subscribers
The most visible example is Bluey, an animated series produced by Australia’s Ludo Studio. BBC Studios holds worldwide distribution and licensing rights to it. The series has its own official channel on YouTube. In March 2025 BBC Studios received a YouTube Diamond Creator Award for the show’s 10 million subscribers. At that time, the Bluey channel portfolio had more than 21 million subscribers and over 13.07 billion views. The Bluey Book Reads series, aimed mainly at digital platforms, had more than 75 million views by then.
Helen O’Donnell, vice president for content and creators at BBC Studios, described the role YouTube plays for the studio at the StreamTV Europe conference in April 2026. “It’s really creating a front door to some of our shows.” According to her, the studio’s channels publish “not just clips, but also original content”.
Under Pina’s post, Danny Moore, founder of the digital football station FX League, expanded on the Bluey example from Jasmine Dawson’s text. According to him, Bluey shows “stories that become part of family life”, which have commercial value from viewing through to books and live events. Tobias Hoss of Lunar X, a firm that invests in creator brands, added a comment: “YouTube is the epicenter of culture and the place where big shows get published today.”
Podcasts move onto TV screens
In the Czech Republic, according to research by Český rozhlas from April 2025, 63% of internet users aged 15 to 70 listen to podcasts at least once a month, and 44% at least once a week. According to the České podcasty catalogue, in the second quarter of 2026 2,900 Czech podcasts released at least one episode.
In the US, podcasts increasingly play on TV. The share of regular listeners who most often play them on the TV rose from 1% in 2021 to 13% in the first quarter of 2026, according to Edison Podcast Metrics. Globally, YouTube says it has one billion monthly podcast viewers. In October 2025 alone, people watched more than 700 million hours of podcasts on TVs and other living room devices. A year earlier it was 400 million. Each service counts podcast views differently, so figures from different services cannot simply be added together. Measuring podcasts is therefore not straightforward.
YouTube also competes with other platforms for viewers of video podcasts on TV. Spotify and Netflix agreed in October 2025 that selected video podcasts from Spotify Studios and The Ringer would run on Netflix from the start of 2026, first in the US. The first of them, The Bill Simmons Podcast, premiered on Netflix on 11 January 2026.
The EU Digital Markets Act applies to YouTube
On 6 September 2023, the European Commission designated YouTube as one of the core platform services of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). This gives Alphabet obligations towards YouTube’s business users, which can include broadcasters and creators publishing on the platform.
The US figures and the experience of the BBC and BBC Studios suggest that distribution is shifting towards platforms for which content is made directly. For the BBC, alongside its own services, YouTube is now one such platform.
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