YouTube TV passes eight million subscriber milestone

YouTube TV now has over eight million subscribers, according to the video streaming site’s CEO Neal Mohan, who provided the update in an annual letter to creators yesterday.

Surpassing this milestone effectively makes YouTube TV, the Alphabet-owned video site’s vMVPD, the fourth largest pay TV operator in the US, and represents significant growth from the five million or so subscribers the service had in 2022.

The announcement comes as cable operator Charter Communications narrowly overtook Comcast to become the biggest pay TV player with 14.122 million customers, against Comcast’s 14.106 million.

YouTube TV’s growth also appears to be contributing to a slowdown in the decline of pay TV overall, offsetting the sharp declines experienced by traditional cable players.

Reporting “growing interest in our subscription services”, YouTube’s Mohan said that the TV offering had now passed the eight million subs milestone just as YouTube Music and Premium subscribers surpassed the 100 million mark.

“This year, we’ll continue to deliver a best-in-class experience for subscriptions and YouTube in the living room,” said Mohan, who said that bringing YouTube to “the living room experience”, including sports “really shows the future of YouTube”, citing the site’s reported success with its first season of NFL Sunday Ticket American football.

“When I started at YouTube, people thought about content from major studios and content from creators as entirely different, but today that stark divide is gone. Viewers want everything in one place, from a live sports game to the BBC to Khan Academy and Nikkie Tutorials,” said Mohan.

“And they’re watching YouTube the way we used to sit down together for traditional TV shows – on the biggest screen in the home with friends and family. Their numbers are impressive. Viewers globally now watch more than 1 billion hours on average of YouTube content on their TVs every day. According to Nielsen’s report on streaming in the U.S., YouTube was the leader in streaming watchtime for the past 11 months.”