Is YouTube becoming television?

Your dad is watching YouTube on the telly. Not on his phone. On the big screen in the living room, sound up, remote in hand.

Ofcom put numbers on that in July. Average daily YouTube viewing on UK TV sets went from 9 minutes per person in 2022 to 19 minutes in 2025. Double, in three years. Add every connected device in the home and YouTube now takes 41 minutes a day, up from 33.

So if you buy or make video, you've got a planning question to answer. Does YouTube sit in your TV plan now, or your social plan? Here's how we'd answer it.

What the Ofcom numbers actually say

The Media Nations 2026 report landed on 29 July. The bits worth knowing:

• YouTube viewing on TV sets doubled since 2022, from 9 minutes a day to 19.
• Total in-home YouTube viewing is 41 minutes a day per person, up from 33 in 2022.
• Older viewers are the growth story. Weekly reach among the over-75s went from 28% in 2022 to 33% in 2025.
• Traditional broadcasters still reach 70% of us weekly, but that's down from 78% in 2022.
• Broadcaster on-demand (iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4, 5) grew 9% year on year. It's the fastest-growing category of TV service.
• Netflix and the BBC are level as the first place viewers look for something to watch, on 26% and 25%. Ofcom says that gap isn't statistically significant, so treat them as tied. ITV is on 15%, YouTube on 10%.
• By share of all in-home video viewing, the BBC took 18% in 2025, YouTube 15% and ITV 11%. YouTube is the UK's second most-watched video service.
• 46% of in-home YouTube viewing now happens on a TV set, up from 27% in 2022.
• Live still matters. 85% of sports viewing in 2025 was watched live, and the BBC's World Cup semi-final peaked at 24 million viewers across its platforms.

Read those together and you get the real picture. Broadcast isn't dead and YouTube isn't a niche. They're both in the living room, competing for the same hour after tea.

It looks like TV. It doesn't behave like TV.

On a TV set, YouTube gets watched the way telly gets watched. Sound on, lean back, often with other people in the room. That's a very different viewing state from someone scrolling Shorts on the bus with the volume off.

But the mechanics underneath are still YouTube. Your viewer chose the video. If you're running skippable in-stream, they can drop you after five seconds. There's no schedule, so there's no 9pm slot to buy, and the algorithm decides what plays next rather than a continuity announcer.

That combination is the thing brands keep getting wrong. They either treat YouTube like a social feed and serve it phone-shaped creative, or they treat it like ITV and forget the skip button exists.

What changes for your brand

Plan it as TV, buy it as YouTube

If you're doing any kind of reach and frequency planning, YouTube now belongs in that conversation alongside BVoD and linear. Ask what incremental reach it buys you on top of the broadcasters, not whether it beats Instagram on clicks. Judge it on cost per completed view and cost per thousand reached, and set a frequency cap. That cap matters more here than you'd think: a quarter of YouTube's TV-set audience accounts for 89% of the viewing on TV sets. Uncapped, you'll hammer the heavy viewers and barely touch everyone else.

Make it for the big screen

A portrait crop on a 55-inch screen looks like a mistake, because it is one. Landscape 16:9 for connected TV placements. Text big enough to read from the sofa, and no captions crammed into the bottom 10% where the progress bar sits. Design for sound on, then check it still works muted for the phone impressions you'll also get.

Front-load, then let it breathe

On skippable in-stream, the skip button appears at five seconds, so your brand and your point go in first. You can also buy 30-second non-skippable on connected TV, which holds the full message but costs you on a CPM basis whether people care or not. Either way, a living-room viewer will give you longer than a feed viewer will. Two or three minutes of a genuinely good film can hold. Test a longer cut against your short one rather than assuming six seconds is the ceiling.

Fix your measurement before you spend

Almost nobody clicks from a telly. Some connected TVs show a QR code next to a skippable ad, but that's a bonus rather than a measurement plan. If your reporting only counts last-click conversions, connected TV spend will look like a waste of money and you'll switch it off for the wrong reason. Use brand lift studies, geo holdout tests, or a simple before-and-after on branded search volume. Then agree with your finance person what success looks like, in advance.

Treat your channel as a channel

The organic side of this matters just as much. Channel 4 and ITV now push full-length programmes onto YouTube, and the BBC has expanded its own YouTube strategy with platform-first commissions. They're doing that because watch time on a TV set is worth having. If your own channel is a dumping ground for old ads and event recaps, that's the gap. Series beat one-offs. Thumbnails and titles do more work than your brand guidelines will want to admit.

Where it changes almost nothing

If you're a local business spending £500 a month to generate leads, don't start cosplaying as Coca-Cola. Search, local service ads and tight paid social will still do more for you than a brand film.

Big live moments still belong to the broadcasters, and the World Cup numbers prove it. And check your own audience before you follow a headline. Children aged 4 to 15 watch the most YouTube of any group, at 61 minutes a day in the home, while 16 to 24s are the only age group whose weekly reach has fallen, now for two years running. Your customers might be in the growing bit, or the shrinking bit.

So, differently or not?

Differently from the YouTube you planned in 2019, yes. You've got a genuine television audience there now, watching on a proper screen with the sound up, and phone-first creative wastes it.

Plan it as television. Make it as YouTube. Measure it like the brand media it actually is.

Quick checklist before your next round of video:

• Are your connected TV placements getting landscape creative, or a cropped Reel?
• Is your brand visible before the five-second skip?
• Can you read the on-screen text from six feet away?
• Do you have a frequency cap set?
• Do you have any measure of success that isn't last-click?
• Does your channel have a series on it, or a graveyard?

Have a look at how we plan and produce video , or get in touch and we'll tell you straight whether YouTube deserves a line in your budget this year.

Sources

1. Ofcom (2026) Media Nations: UK 2026 . Published 29 July 2026. Viewing data sourced from Barb.
2. Ofcom (2026) Nation's media habits revealed in annual Ofcom report .
3. Google (2026) About video ad formats , Google Ads Help.
4. Google (2026) About YouTube TV ad formats , Google Ads Help.