After a lifetime on broadcast television, the Oscars will move onto YouTube exclusively in 2029, streaming live and worldwide as the premiere American film awards show pushes to cultivate a more international audience
The Los Angeles Times reports that under a new four-year agreement between the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and YouTube, the streaming giant will have exclusive global rights to the Academy Awards starting in 2029, the year after its centennial.
The deal includes red carpet coverage and behind-the-scenes access, which will stream live to viewers around the world on YouTube and to US customers on YouTube TV.
Leadership at the Academy framed the move as part of a growing international focus, reflected in the expansion and diversification of members in recent years. By streaming on YouTube, they said in a statement, “We will be able to celebrate cinema, inspire new generations of filmmakers and provide access to our film history on an unprecedented global scale.”
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Internationalisation is definitely a challenge for the Academy. South Korean director Bong Joon Ho, whose movie Parasite (2019) was the first non-English language film to win Best Picture, famously dismissed the Oscars as a “very local” awards show. He’s not wrong; nearly half of the acting winners, for example, hail from the US or UK and non-English language films rarely get recognised outside of the Best international Feature Film category
Declining viewership is another concern for the nearly century-old awards show. While the 2025 edition improved on the previous year, drawing in around 19.7 million viewers, it still pales in comparison to the Oscars’ heyday in the 1990s and early 2000s when over 40 million tuned in.
YouTube, in addition to more than 2 billion logged-in users monthly, is meanwhile the third largest pay-TV distributor in the US and industry analysts expect it to take the number one spot within the next few years
Through YouTube parent company Google, the agreement also establishes a long-term digital hub for cinema history. The Google Arts & Culture Initiative will provide digital access to some Academy Museum exhibitions and programmes, and Google will help with digitising a portion of the Academy Collection. This would open up the largest film-related archive in the world, home to more than 52 million items, to a global audience for the first time.
