Vanity Fair: The Oscars Transition from Television to YouTube
In a historic change, the Oscars will no longer be broadcast on television, starting in 2029—when the ceremony will move to YouTube. On Wednesday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a multiyear deal that will give YouTube exclusive global rights to the Oscars, beginning in 2029 and running through 2033. The 100th Oscar ceremony, in 2028, will be the final show broadcast through the Academy’s current deal with ABC.
The YouTube deal includes not only the Oscars, but also red-carpet coverage and other major Academy events, including the Governors Awards, the Oscar nominations announcement, and the Oscar nominees luncheon. “The Academy is an international organization, and this partnership will allow us to expand access to the work of the Academy to the largest worldwide audience possible—which will be beneficial for our Academy members and the film community,” said Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Academy president Lynette Howell Taylor in a statement.
Like all awards shows, the Oscar ceremony has struggled to maintain or grow its audience on broadcast television in recent years. The 2025 broadcast hit around 19.7 million viewers, just slightly more than the 19.5 million who watched in 2024. While that uptick seems like a move in the right direction, the viewership numbers haven’t been anywhere close to what they were before the 2020 pandemic.
The Academy has been fretting for years over how to keep the show relevant and bring in a younger audience, even as moviegoing habits continue to change. Making the show available to YouTube’s more than 2 billion viewers around the world—and to YouTube TV subscribers in the United States—is one way to do that. Plus, the Oscars have always been difficult to watch for viewers outside of the U.S. This change has the potential to make it more accessible globally, as the voter body becomes more and more international.
The SAG Awards (now called the Actor Awards) made a similar shift in 2024, moving from cable TV to Netflix in hopes that a streaming service might give the show a wider and more global audience. Netflix doesn’t release ratings, so it’s unclear how much of a bump in viewership that show has seen from its big move away from broadcast.
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