Bow down to YouTube, the lord of the living room

When my 12-year-old daughter plunks onto the sofa for TV time, she might dial up Netflix to binge-watch Gossip Girl or switch on the PS5 for a little Hogwarts Legacy. But when she really wants to veg out, she goes for YouTube. 

After dinner, during those precious minutes when Mom and Dad are still doing the dishes, our teen will reliably have the Siri Remote in her fist, thumb down on the voice input button for some big-screen YouTube searches. 

“Honest Trailers,” she’ll say in that robotic “I’m taking to a voice assistant” tone, and then she’ll start scrolling through an endless row of clips, every “Honest Trailers” episode from Attack of the Clones and Barbie to The Marvels and X-Men. Some episodes (I’m looking at you, Dune 2) I’ve seen over and over, as I wait patiently for the last clip to be over (“One more!”) so we can actually watch something. 

Then there’s “Pitch Meeting,” another movie-focused YouTube series with an endless number of episodes, all following the same formula and repeating the same catchphrases (“Talking cats are tight!”) over and over. (Alright, some of them are kinda funny.)

Lately, a popular after-dinner YouTube interlude has been Saturday Night Live clips, especially the ones featuring Taylor Swift or Ryan Gosling. I’ve often pointed out that we actually have full episodes of SNL sitting in our Plex DVR queue, but no—my daughter would rather watch clips on YouTube. 

And now that the Philadelphia Eagles have won the Super Bowl, we’re watching one clip after another of sound bites, random talking heads in their basements, slideshows with AI-generated commentary, the 10-best-plays-of-the-Super-Bowl clips, and more about our favorite NFL team, all on YouTube. 

It’s an endless, gaping maw of content, much of it blocky and low-quality, some of it VERY LOUD, always bite-sized, like one Frito-Lays chip after another, powerless to stop. 

Yes, I admit, I’m another grumpy X-gen shaking his fist at the algo. The “I remember when’s” are implicit, as I reminisce about the good old days when we watched real shows from beginning to end, like Knight Rider, Manimal, and, uh…anyway, I digress. 

My point (yes, I’m getting there) is that when YouTube CEO Neal Mohan declares that “YouTube is the new television,” I believe him. 

According to Mohan’s annual YouTube blog post (with this year marking the streamer’s 20^th year), the world is watching more than a billion hours of content on YouTube–each day, mind you.

Put another way, it would take a single person roughly 314 years to sit through the combined daily streaming of all YouTubers. 

We’re also watching more YouTube on the big screen than we are on phones, Mohan boasts. 

So yes, YouTube is the new TV, like it or not.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some “Honest Trailers” to watch.