YouTube is the biggest beast in the attentional infrastructure of modern media,” Amol Rajan, presenter of Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, announced this week. Listeners around the country – the older ones, at least – must have been left perplexed. What is the “attentional infrastructure”? And isn’t YouTube just a website for sharing videos of kittens mewing or post-operative children high on trace sedatives?
No. According to the media regulator Ofcom, YouTube is now the second-most watched service in the UK, ahead of ITV and behind only the BBC. Linear TV – the old tradition of live broadcast – has been staving off doom-mongers for the past decade but now stands on a precipice. Generations Z and Alpha (the youngest set of pre-teen media consumers) have already migrated overwhelmingly to streaming, whether via video sharing platforms (such as YouTube) or subscription video-on-demand services (such as Netflix). The former is now the premier TV destination among the fresh-faced four-to-15 demographic.
