Comment: From Tuning In to Choosing In

This felt like one of those inevitable stories you get in media, yet still a momentous one when we consider the shift of our entire behaviours and consumption habits – YouTube has beaten the BBC on Barb’s monthly 3-minute reach in the UK. Not by much, but by enough – 51.9m versus 50.8m. 

That decimal place matters because it’s a behavioural contest not a popularity contest, and it says the country’s most common act of television is no longer tuning in, it’s choosing in.

For years we’ve talked about the death of TV with a sort of lazy confidence but to me TV didn’t die, it dissolved and leaked out of the box and into the rest of life. Until the idea of television stopped being a channel and became a way of watching. That’s the paradox here, the death of TV is also the moment everything else became TV.

You can see it in the machinery of YouTube’s rise on smart TVs, and in the type of content that now lives there. This isn’t just kids stuff, pranks and Minecraft watchalongs. It’s premium creator formats, longform interviews, podcasts, live streams, sport analysis, full-fat entertainment that would once have needed a commissioning editor and a studio lot. The living room got a new supplier.

Lockdown was the dress rehearsal. I distinctly remember when I was over at Defected Records watching how quickly YouTube became the natural front door to the living room. People didn’t “go online” to watch a virtual festival we hosted. Instead they put it on the biggest screen in the house and made a night of it, exactly as they would with Glastonbury highlights or Match of the Day.

It felt like a small cultural hack at the time, or a workaround for a strange year, but in hindsight it was a blueprint.

Once YouTube became the default way to bring a shared moment into the home then the old hierarchy started to look threatened.

The BBC’s challenge isn’t that it suddenly makes worse programmes. It has utterly outstanding programming (despite bias and judgement issues around its news editorial), the problem is that it is still organised around a world where distribution is a kind of privilege and YouTube is organised around a world where distribution is the entire gravity. It finds you, and it follows you, waits for you on every device and because it is data-native, it doesn’t just publish content randomly it learns your appetite in real time. 

That is an unfair advantage, but it is also the environment we now live in, which everyone is chained to. Of course the Barb stat funnily uses a TV-like measure to validate a platform that spent a decade insisting it wasn’t TV.

Three consecutive minutes in a month is not a ‘fan’, and for me it’s not even a ‘viewer’ in the romantic sense, it’s simply proof of you being there with a pulse. Proof that YouTube is now part of the national furniture in the way the BBC has been for generations. 

That should worry those of us who genuinely care about public media, in light of the alarming cuts in the US too. But it should also sharpen the argument and quickly move things along.

Social media is barely social, the main platforms are all broadcasting – shorts, Reels, stories, Tiktok, the lot. If everything has become TV then the real fight isn’t about screens, it’s about what kind of national story gets told on them. The BBC still has a unique job to remain the place that can create shared reality in a world increasingly built from 67 million different personalised feeds.

YouTube winning the reach figure is a milestone but the more important question is what we want the next milestone to mean for us.

James Kirkham is founder of ICONIC