The Oscars used to be a guaranteed night for television to capture a large audience, generate huge ratings, and charge a fortune to advertise during the commercial breaks. In recent years, however, even the Oscars telecast has been unable to avoid the flagging fortunes of awards shows; the 19.7 million viewers the show attracted to ABC in 2025 are a fraction of what the show would have drawn in the not-too-distant past. The 2028 Oscars, therefore, will make news not just because it will be the 100th Academy Awards ceremony, but because it will be the final one to air on broadcast TV. Beginning in 2029, the Oscars will stream exclusively on YouTube.
It’s the next sign the future is here, according to 710 WOR’s Rich DeMuro. The host of “Rich on Tech,” heard Sunday nights from 8-11pm on WOR, dropped in on the Mendte in the Morning program to explain why the Academy decided to push the envelope and become the latest TV staple to try its hand at streaming.
“This is a wild move,” DeMuro told host Larry Mendte. “The Oscars, which have been on ABC for so long, are moving to YouTube in 2029. They’ve been on ABC for more than fifty years… and it’s just wild to see this move to streaming, and by the way, at the same time we’re seeing Netflix trying to buy Warner Brothers. There’s so many changes with Hollywood with the tech world, but I think this is a good one because it’s going to make this show available to two billion YouTube users around the world at the same time, live and free… will the ratings be as high? I don’t know; streaming is a completely different beast than over-the-air TV.”
DeMuro says despite the decreasing interest in the Oscars, it’s well worth trying, considering the money-making ideas the Oscars can still spawn: “They’re going to do a whole bunch of programming around this as well. They do the red-carpet shows and all that stuff- all of that is moving to YouTube, so yeah, there could be some sort of entertainment pop-up channel on YouTube TV or a YouTube dedicated [channel]. We’re not sure. They’ve got a couple of years to figure this out, but this is a seismic shift in Hollywood.”
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