What’s the difference between YouTube and TV? Two decades ago, that would have been a very easy question to answer. TV was the stuff that was on – you guessed it – television, with its budgets, scripts, multiple camera angles and lights. The first video ever uploaded to YouTube, meanwhile, could never have been mistaken for it. “All right, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants,” a pixelated young man told the camera. “The cool thing about these guys is that … is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks.” The video was uploaded on 23 April 2005 and marked the true launch of the video-sharing site.
This February, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan declared: “YouTube is the new television.” He was referring to the fact that more and more people watch YouTube videos on the big screen: apparently, users play 1bn hours of YouTube on their smart TVs a day. But at the same time, more and more people are watching TV on YouTube: Disney uploaded the first three episodes of its Star Wars spin-off Andor to the site in March, while ITV has been sharing its shows on YouTube since December.
