The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences signed a deal that gives YouTube exclusive global rights to the Oscars starting in 2029. Not a streaming partnership. Not a simulcast. Exclusive rights.

That’s the first time one of the big four awards shows—Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, Tonys—has completely abandoned broadcast television.

If you think that’s just about declining viewership, you’re missing the structural shift underneath.

Appointment Viewing Is Already Dead

Between 2015 and 2020, appointment viewing decreased sharply while binge watching became the dominant consumption pattern. The data shows this isn’t a temporary trend. It’s a permanent recalibration of how humans engage with content.

I’ve been creating content for thirty-five years. I watched Dish Network disrupt cable in the nineties. I watched COVID-19 empty movie theaters while seventy-inch LED screens and surround sound systems turned living rooms into private theaters. I watched the entire infrastructure of “when content airs” collapse into “when I decide to watch it.”

The Oscars moving to YouTube isn’t about where the eyeballs are today. It’s about where the infrastructure is heading.

YouTube isn’t just a platform anymore. It’s becoming a publisher. A production studio. A distribution center. They’re building the Netflix model—own the production, own the distribution, own the revenue.

Clip-Ability Defeats the Broadcast Schedule

Here’s what most businesses miss about this shift.

A three-hour awards show on broadcast television is a single event. It airs once. You watch it or you don’t. The next day, it’s over.

That same three-hour show on YouTube becomes an infinite content library.

Best acceptance speech? Clipped and distributed. Controversial moment? Clipped and distributed. Fashion analysis? Clipped and distributed. Behind-the-scenes footage? Clipped and distributed.

Every segment becomes a searchable, discoverable, recommendation-engine-optimized piece of content that continues generating views for months or years.

The broadcast model creates a spike. The YouTube model creates a compounding asset.

I’ve been preaching this to my clients for years. We’re not creating disposable content. We’re creating long-term assets that can be used time and time again.

Think about network television in the eighties, nineties, and two thousands. Those commercials didn’t run once. They ran constantly. There are two metrics that mattered: frequency and continuity. Those two things drive brand awareness and subsequent calls to action.

You wouldn’t buy anything from anyone who only ran one ad. You have to understand and intimately intuit the value that product or brand brings to your life. That’s where the decision to part with money lives—do I trust them enough, and will it provide me enough benefit that I’m willing to exchange cash for the perceived benefit of the product.

Interest Media Is Replacing Social Media

There’s a bigger shift happening underneath all of this.

Social media was built on the friend graph. You followed people you knew. The algorithm showed you what your connections posted.

Interest media is built on the interest graph. The algorithm shows you content based on what you’ve demonstrated you care about, regardless of who created it.

TikTok proved this model works. Their interest-predicting algorithm shows videos based not on subjects or social networks but on content others with similar consumption patterns have also enjoyed.

When researchers removed that personalization, daily use frequency dropped, duration decreased, and users reported less enjoyment. Interest-based distribution defeats social-graph distribution.

But here’s where it gets interesting for businesses.

Instagram now surfaces 50% of feed content through AI recommendations, often favoring Reels over static posts. Platforms now serve 50% of content to non-followers based on interest signals.

The friend graph is being replaced by the interest graph across all major platforms.

That changes everything about how content works.

YouTube Compounds. TikTok Spikes.

I’ve watched this pattern play out with my own clients.

TikTok focuses on short bursts of momentary gratification. You get a spike of attention. Then it disappears. The content typically vanishes from feeds within twenty-four to forty-eight hours of posting.

YouTube ranks as the second largest search engine globally after Google. Videos created months or years ago continue generating views, subscribers, and revenue through search results and recommendations.

That’s the difference between a system that compounds and a system that spikes.

One of my clients, a company called MedQ, makes a sophisticated platform-as-a-service for radiologic imaging and subsequent diagnosis of medical conditions. They certainly could not describe a product that takes several years to understand and operate in seventy-five or ninety seconds.

The strategy was to create something that called the individual to action—to learn more about the product either by virtue of a face-to-face demo, an online demo, or watching a long-form video.

Those things created more than three and a half million dollars worth of business in only six months.

We used HubSpot as the CRM on the back end. Once the intake of a lead was in the system, they could use all the tools and features for drip marketing, reminders, appointment setting, schedule management.

The YouTube content initiated the relationship. The CRM nurtured it through to conversion.

That’s a system. Not just content.

The UGC Model Only Works If You Understand the Economics

Here’s what most people miss about the YouTube versus TikTok comparison.

YouTube has pivoted to allow longer formats and increasingly higher production values. Those longer formats enable storytelling, episodics, and a broader array of content models—sports, business, education, personal accomplishments.

But only about three percent of users who create content on YouTube actually make money for a viable income. The bulk of them, nearly eighty percent, only make about fifteen hundred dollars a year. That’s clearly not a livable wage.

The individuals in the YouTube universe who are really making money are doing it because they’re selling products on top of their viewers and subscribers.

That’s where the pivot lives at the base level for UGC.

B2B companies are not going to reach the critical threshold to realize any sort of meaningful revenue from platform monetization. Their goal is to create a call to action that allows a customer to click, call, or appear in a retail location, at a seminar, at a trade show.

That’s where the real revenue model lives.

To perceive that YouTube is going to offset the income level of a sixty-three-million-dollar company by virtue of platform revenue is absolute folly. The purpose is to trigger a call to action that engages the potential customer to move from being a suspect into being a prospect and then subsequently from a prospect to a customer.

The One Person Plus One Problem Plus One Passion Formula

If your videos cover too many unrelated topics, YouTube struggles to understand who to recommend you to. Clear positioning almost always improves growth.

Content that finds success in 2025 is platform-native, visually engaging, conversation-generating, and designed for specific audience interests rather than mass appeal.

The algorithmic environment now punishes broad positioning.

I’ve observed this pattern across dozens of clients. The ones who try to be everything to everyone get lost in the noise. The ones who pick one person, one problem, one passion—they get traction.

A five-to-seven-video series on one topic helps the algorithm understand your niche, boosts playlist performance, and encourages binge-watching. The pattern-matching mechanism rewards structural consistency over viral randomness.

Mid-tier businesses need systems that the algorithm can recognize and amplify, not one-off content spikes that reset visibility with each upload.

What This Means for Your Content Strategy

If you’re still treating content as a broadcast model—create it, post it, move on—you’re operating in a system that’s already obsolete.

The shift from appointment viewing to interest-based discovery means your content needs to be:

Searchable: Built around the language your audience uses when looking for solutions.

Serialized: Connected in ways that help algorithms understand your domain and help viewers understand your depth.

Clip-able: Structured so individual segments can live independently while driving back to the larger system.

Conversion-focused: Designed to move people from awareness to action, not just to generate passive views.

The Oscars moving to YouTube in 2029 is a signal. Major broadcast events are shifting from traditional networks to platforms built for interest-based discovery because that’s where the infrastructure is heading.

The economic model makes this inevitable. YouTube has massive distribution, production capability, and a recommendation engine that keeps people watching. Traditional networks have declining viewership and rising costs.

The Desktop Publishing Parallel

I’ve been thinking about this shift in the context of my own history.

In the early eighties, desktop publishing disrupted the entire production model. Suddenly, an individual could walk in, grab the tools, and produce their own content without needing access to expensive printing infrastructure or specialized production teams.

That’s exactly what’s happening now with video content.

YouTube’s evolution to include higher quality UGC content creators naturally includes individuals and companies like mine as partners in that transformation.

By helping clients build sustainable content systems on YouTube, I’m positioning both their businesses and mine for where media is heading.

These moments of technology democratization create massive opportunities for those who understand them early.

What You Should Do Next

If you’re a mid-tier business in the growth phase between survival and institutionalization, this shift matters to you.

Stop thinking about content as something you post and forget. Start thinking about it as infrastructure you build.

Audit your current content through this lens: Does it compound or does it spike? Can someone discover it six months from now through search, or does it disappear after forty-eight hours?

If you’re creating content that spikes, you’re renting attention. If you’re creating content that compounds, you’re building equity.

The Oscars just told you which model wins.

Most businesses aren’t listening.

You should be.