Inside YouTube’s Impact on TV, Sports and Late-Night Comedy Shows

For a moment, the 50-yard line at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, was the media capital of the world. As the San Francisco 49ers were warming up for a Sept. 21 game against the Arizona Cardinals, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell caught the eye of Neal Mohan. The YouTube CEO, flanked by a handful of his platform’s top creators, marched onto the field and embraced Goodell.

About an hour or so after their meeting on the field, the moguls addressed creators and guests in a suite. “We want to continue to double down on that partnership you saw,” the YouTube chief said, referring to the first exclusive NFL game that YouTube hosted live, the Sept. 5 contest between the Los Angeles Chargers and Kansas City Chiefs, which they played in Brazil.

“More to come, right?” Goodell quipped in response.

“Well, that’s up for you to decide,” Mohan replied.

When asked a few minutes later whether that means YouTube is in a strong position to carry exclusive NFL games going forward, Goodell was unequivocal. “Absolutely,” he said.

But as big a deal as YouTube becoming a league broadcast partner would be (on top of its existing $2 billion deal for NFL Sunday Ticket), the platform’s scale and cultural relevance were also on display in Santa Clara. Even with the 49ers on the field, a large group of kids on a rope line near the stands were screaming for one of the creators that had joined Mohan, sports influencer Jesse “Jesser” Riedel, as parents jockeyed to get them closer for a photo or autograph.

“It’s a blessing,” Jesser said modestly after heading back into a tunnel under the stands, away from the roar of the crowd. The kids were there for the 49ers, but a YouTuber stole the show.

***

During the past 20 years, the Google-owned YouTube has slowly — then rapidly — become a dominant force in media, the hub for a wide array of genres, from talk and comedy to food and unscripted fare. But the bigger prize for the video platform would be to take over the other hours people are spending on their TV sets, and there are signs that YouTube is close to a breakthrough there.

Sports, led by the NFL, is in many ways the final frontier for YouTube to conquer. The platform is on the verge of subsuming the genres that have helped define the past 100 years of TV. In fact, the CEO noted in his annual letter to the YouTube community that the platform’s viewership on TV sets has “surpassed mobile and is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S.”

For someone running one of the most important entertainment companies in the world, Mohan, 52, is very much of the Silicon Valley mold, not a creature of Hollywood. He has an electrical engineering degree from Stanford and was an executive at the ad tech firm DoubleClick when Google acquired it in 2007, joining it in the deal. He went on to lead the tech giant’s display business before becoming YouTube’s chief product officer in 2015 and its CEO in 2023.

He carries himself with an amiable and good-natured Midwestern attitude (he was born in Indiana, where his dad was a grad student at Purdue). It’s a personality that meshes well with YouTube’s stable of creators, many of whom are, befitting their on-camera personalities, over-the-top and engaging. Just as Hollywood executives are eager to give notes to creators and put their stamp on content, Mohan is happy to step back and let the creators on his platform lead the way.

While the creators at the NFL game were filming a wacky sketch in the end zone, Mohan was watching from the sidelines, beaming at the access his platform gave them. It was a real-life metaphor: Mohan is happy to cheer from the sidelines while the creators are in the spotlight.

But while he is a tech executive first and foremost, Mohan says that it is his “deeply personal” love of stories that keeps him engaged.

“I am a technologist, but I also love media and storytelling. I’ve been that way since I can remember, I’m a fan myself, fundamentally,” he says. “Leading YouTube is a privilege where I can actually bring both those pieces together, that human storytelling and creativity and the best of technology, that’s what motivates me every morning.”

As Mohan is fond of saying, “There’s only one YouTube,” and in a landscape littered with streaming services, it can still find ways to surprise. On Sept. 16, a few days before his summit with Goodell in Santa Clara, Mohan took to the stage in Google’s office at Pier 57 in New York with news to share: Over the past four years, YouTube had paid out more than $100 billion to its creators, artists and media partners. After his presentation to creators ended, he stood on the stage in the Google office taking photos with attendees, chatting about their hopes and concerns.

Walking through New York’s Meatpacking District later that evening to a reception the platform was hosting, Mohan reflected on that moment onstage. “There are two really fundamental things that we do for creators,” he said. “One is help them build an audience and connect with their fans, regardless of where those fans are in the world; and the second thing we do is we help them build businesses. That’s what that $100 billion represents for me.”

It’s also reflected in the company’s bottom line: YouTube generated more than $36 billion in advertising revenue in 2024, and executives say annual revenue — including subscriptions like YouTube Premium and YouTube Music — tops $50 billion, with revenues shared with the more than 3 million creators in its Partner Program, which reflects channels monetizing their videos. Both numbers are rising fast, even as traditional entertainment companies find themselves stagnating.

It’s come a long way since the 19-second “me at the zoo” video was uploaded in April 2005. Now, per a KPMG report released Sept. 23, YouTube is second only to Comcast in terms of annual content spend, inclusive of payments to creators and media companies, paying out as much as Netflix and Paramount combined, $32 billion.

Already, many of the genres that once defined cable TV have migrated to YouTube. Chefs explaining recipes in the kitchen, once the domain of Food Network, have moved there (even The New York Times‘ cooking section is going all in on YouTube videos), while creators like Dude Perfect and Mark Rober are creating shows that would once have been right at home on Discovery Channel or Nickelodeon.

The only question is what genres it will take over next, and how quickly it will do so. From talk shows to scripted dramas to, yes, live sports, there are signs that the platform’s ambitions will collide with the traditional TV business sooner rather than later.

***

Everyone knows late night TV is in trouble. The Late Show With Stephen Colbert has been canceled at CBS, while Jimmy Kimmel’s short-lived suspension at ABC brought fresh attention to the struggles of the format. YouTube has slowly, then all at once, become the de facto home for what had been late night, not only for the shows on linear TV, but for an emerging crop of new talent born on the platform.

As it happens, late night itself transformed YouTube when the Saturday Night Live skit “Lazy Sunday” went viral 20 years ago on the platform, which had only been live for a few months.

“One of the really big [shifts] was Saturday Night Live and clips getting consumed not on Saturday night but on Sunday morning, when people would open up YouTube,” Mohan says, adding that it was in his mind a “seminal moment” in the platform’s history. “In that sense, they were a pioneer in getting their content out to so many viewers.”

It was a seminal moment inside the big media companies, too.

“As somebody who was at NBC at the time, part of the thinking was, ‘How do we build out the NBC universe of websites so that people know to come here to get the clips of these shows?’ ” recalls Gavin Purcell, the former showrunner for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “[YouTube] knew the value of having it all in one place.”

As consumer preferences collide with a burgeoning ecosystem of video podcasts (YouTube now claims more than 1 billion podcast users monthly), the world of late night, and for that matter TV talk shows more generally, increasingly revolves around the platform.

One current late night producer says that almost every A-list booking now includes some sort of sketch or bit that they think will play well on YouTube, but booking those guests in the first place has become less of a sure thing. A veteran Hollywood publicist says that for many of their clients, they are now recommending that YouTube podcasts or shows become the first stop, or at least a major stop, on press tours.

Just look at Alex Cooper, whose recent guests on Call Her Daddy include Cardi B and Gwyneth Paltrow; Brittany Broski, who spoke to David Corenswet for her series Royal Court; or Travis and Jason Kelce’s New Heights, which hosted Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio Del Toro to talk about One Battle After Another, not to mention Taylor Swift, Travis’ fiancée, to announce her new album. “I think Royal Court is an exciting example that was, by accident, what the new Hollywood is shaping up to be,” Broski says. “I’m not trying to get you. I’m not trying to get the tea. I want to hang out with you.”

In fact, what had been late night is being splintered into pieces, where consumers can create their own show, complete with comedy sketches, political monologues and jokes, musical performances and interview segments all pulled from different channels.

“It gets reconstituted in your feed, which is a personalized set of preferences in terms of what speaks to you around that particular format, whether it’s the monologue, whether it’s the sketch, whether it’s what Brittany [Broski] does in terms of the conversation,” Mohan says.

“All of us on YouTube come from a world where when you want to create something, you just go do it,” says Adam Waheed (he goes by “Adam W”), whose YouTube comedy sketches routinely draw millions of views on the platform. “You don’t wait for somebody, you don’t ask somebody. You just go make it. And you get feedback right away.”

That freedom is particularly relevant in the moment, with Colbert on the way out next year and Kimmel surely weighing his options at ABC.

“As you’ve no doubt observed, many people who came from that linear background have found lots of success on YouTube and been able to control their destiny and their creative ambitions,” Mohan says, perhaps tempting the fate of broadcast TV veterans.

The result of the podcast explosion and the late night revolution is what Purcell calls a “flattening” of the format, where big stars can leverage their fame to become major YouTube creators and creators can leverage the platform to become big stars themselves.

“The people that used to host podcasts were no-names in some form, and a lot of names have come into this space,” says Purcell, who also co-hosts a podcast himself on YouTube called AI For Humans. “I would argue that Amy Poehler’s podcast [Good Hang] is not that different than what, say, Tom Snyder was doing at 12:30 back in the day, except she’s funnier and she’s more charming, and the guests that come in are bigger because of the distribution platform.” 

Nielsen has been tracking the streaming platforms that consumers watch on their TV screens ever since it launched what it calls The Gauge in 2021. But over the past year, YouTube’s domination of The Gauge has unnerved executives at some competitors. The most recent Gauge report showed that YouTube was by far the most watched video platform, holding 13.1 percent share. Netflix, in second place, was at 8.7 percent.

Nielsen senior vp product strategy Brian Fuhrer says that today reminds him of the early days of cable TV. “As the cable networks got bigger and bigger, and they had a lot of penetration, their ratings naturally increased,” he says.

It was a flywheel effect, a flywheel that now appears in motion for YouTube, at the same time that most of the rest of the streaming business (Netflix notably excluded) is stuck in stagnation.

***

In an industrial park in the shadow of the Burbank airport, a suburban street is coming to life. There are shops and restaurants, a school and homes, both wealthy and more working class. Pumpkins appear on the doorsteps around Halloween, and Christmas lights around the holidays, but not everything is as it seems.

The street is a facade. It’s a full-scale set inside the 125,000-square foot-studio of Dhar Mann, the YouTube creator who is on a mission to turbocharge the creation of inspiring, uplifting scripted entertainment.

Mann is perhaps the biggest creator in the scripted space on YouTube, with his studio turning out everything from shortform scenes to feature-length movies.

In YouTube’s quest to take over TV, scripted entertainment may be the ultimate challenge. The cultural relevance of shows like The White Lotus or Abbott Elementary simply hasn’t been replicated yet on a user-generated platform, though Mann’s operation is a sign of just how far things have come.

“A lot of times when people think of YouTube content, it’s mainly spectacle-based or gamified, or music or podcasting, reactionary content, but there’s a whole ecosystem of scripted content that’s really growing, and I think it’s going to be one of the areas that really explodes,” Mann says.

“I do think it is maybe the early phases of growth that we’re seeing there,” affirms Mohan.

Mann, like many other creators, does not produce content at the cadence that traditional studios do. He will have as many as eight productions going at once in his studio, spanning lengths and genres.

“Traditional Hollywood is like, ‘I’ll put out eight episodes or 10 episodes of something, and it took me a year to make it,’ ” says Nic Paul, the president of Spotter, which provides capital, tools and resources to creators. “These creators are every week engaging with tens of millions of unique viewers and hundreds of millions of views in 30 days. They’re putting out content either several times a week, every week or every other week. Audiences no longer have to wait.”

But scripted content is also at the heart of one of the tensest parts of the relationship between YouTube, the platform, and the ecosystem of creators who populate it.

Unlike with Netflix or HBO, YouTube creators are taking on the risk for their projects (though, granted, there’s a great disparity in production budgets). If Netflix likes a concept, it picks it up, providing the budget and resources to help get it over the finish line. On YouTube, it is up to the creator to finance and produce their content, and while the platform regularly releases new tools to help them (including AI-enabled tech that suggests video ideas and can create short background videos for use in Shorts), scripted entertainment is a particularly tricky challenge, requiring writers, directors, sets, costumes, lighting, editing, special effects and other production requirements that may go beyond the typical creator-led show.

“If you’re working on scripted, you sometimes might need some of those resources,” Mohan says, arguing that the infrastructure is being built before our eyes. “The best sort of visual example in my head is, if you go down to Burbank, you’ll see on one end of the town, a storied studio like Walt Disney, and then you’ll see rows of these smaller studios.

“It’s just like what happens right here in Silicon Valley, which is that next to the big technology companies, you have this startup ecosystem,” he adds. “People like Kinigra Deon and Dhar Mann and Mythical Entertainment and Alan Chikin Chow, they’re the startups of Hollywood.”

And just like tech startups, that sometimes means looking for outside financing and support.

Some of the biggest creators have turned to the major studios and streamers to help them do the projects they want to do (see MrBeast’s nine-figure deal for Beast Games with Prime Video) or are seeking to raise money to bulk up (MrBeast and Mann have been in the market).

Others have turned to private equity, with several PE-backed firms promising six- and seven-figure investments (in some cases eight figures) to subsidize the production of shows that will live on YouTube in exchange for partial ownership of the show in question.

“There’s a burgeoning ecosystem of investors and studios that are backing YouTube content to bridge that gap” between creativity and financing, one connected source says. “Obviously, there’s a trade-off with that, because you end up giving upside in ownership.”

But creator-driven scripted content may be rising at the perfect moment for Hollywood, which is in the midst of a historic pullback in the genre after years of explosive growth.

“That competition for their IP is going to just get greater and greater,” says Frank Albarella, the U.S. sector leader for media and telecommunications at KPMG. “The evolution of what we’re seeing in terms of viewer preferences is lining up with this transformation of the models from that traditional high-cost, high-investment, high-risk production model, to the user-generated content model.”

Mann, for his part, says that when his studio creates a feature-length scripted film, it costs in the low six figures to produce from start to finish, a fraction of what even the nimblest of traditional production companies operate under.

It’s caught the eye of Hollywood veterans, too: Mann says that he has spoken to executives at traditional studios desperate to understand how he produces content at a fraction of the cost: “As you know, production budgets are constantly getting cut. Production in L.A. is down 45 percent last time I checked, so many studio lots are sitting vacant,” he says.

A creator-led studio is not going to sit back and let its lots remain vacant for long.

***

Across the country, Kinigra Deon is buying a school in Birmingham, Alabama. Known for her scripted content that touches on comedy, drama and even fantasy, this creator has been quietly building out a studio complex where she and her team can soon double their output, and the former Jefferson County school building will make for a critical piece of the puzzle, with so many of her shows and scenes set in schools. Scrolling through photos of the project on her phone, Deon shows off the construction that includes a creator lounge, a place where the actors she casts in her shows and videos can conceptualize and create their own content.

“The goal is to cast more in Alabama, to make Alabama more of a hub for filming and entertainment,” Deon says. The state, in turn, has revamped its entertainment incentive program, which went into effect Oct. 1, upping its annual production cap to $22 million.

Deon is a textbook example of how YouTube is shifting the center of gravity away from Los Angeles, spreading it across the country. Just as MrBeast has turned Greenville, North Carolina, into a veritable company town, Deon wants to turn Birmingham into a true production hub.

Her next big bet is a feature-length movie, backed by Kevin Hart’s HartBeat and the Amazon-funded Spotter. “What I’m hoping for when we release that movie is that it sends a widespread message that you don’t have to wait to release something that you’re passionate about. You just have to do it,” Deon says.

Scott Purdy, the U.S. media industry leader at KPMG, says that more traditional studios and platforms will ultimately pursue deals with scripted creators, though it may take time for some to emerge. MrBeast, for example, isn’t stopping with just Amazon. His company recently hired Corie Henson, the former head of unscripted at NBC, to lead his company’s new studio, which includes animation and scripted content.

In some cases, however, that jump is being made more out of necessity.

“A lot of YouTubers feel as if they have a lot of control over their work and their time and their content, and that’s true to an extent, but algorithm changes can have a significant impact on your success,” says one creator who has spoken to other streaming services about licensing content, explaining why they are exploring options.

“We’re proud of the fact that YouTube is this epicenter of culture, and it looks like other companies have noticed that as well,” Mohan says with a smile when asked about interest from other companies in creator-led content. “But I would also say that what creators always tell me is that their home is YouTube, so I love the fact that they use their success on YouTube to create these other opportunities for themselves.”

Perhaps the most significant things that need to happen for scripted content to break out, multiple sources across the creator ecosystem say, is for ad dollars to migrate from prestige TV (or at least linear TV) toward scripted creators, and for the user experience to match.

“Brands need to recognize the opportunity that’s happening with YouTube — which they are — and that’s going to cause CPMs to start to rise,” Mann says, explaining his thesis. “At a certain point, you get to an inflection point where the cost of creating content is cheaper than the amount of revenue that you can generate because CPMs are going up, costs are going down. And then ultimately, it’s whoever can build the biggest community.”

And YouTube is building out a TV experience that is better suited for that model, rolling out a redesign on TVs that is, frankly, more Netflix-like in appearance, allowing creators to structure their channels around shows and seasons in pursuit of a more traditional TV experience, albeit supplemented with YouTube traits like comments.

“YouTube doesn’t feel like a scripted environment quite yet,” one business-side source says, adding that ultimately, the “monetization plus user experience will get there.”

There are signs that media buyers and marketers are trending in that direction.

“I’ve brought chief investment officers and chief marketing officers to some of these studios, and they can start to see how big a business and how scaled the opportunity is for them,” says Sean Downey, the executive who oversees YouTube parent Google’s sprawling ad sales business. “When you bring 10 clients to see MrBeast in North Carolina, you can start to see the creativity, how they can lift the business, how they integrate their brand into the consumer viewing; you start to see the light bulb go off.”

It’s another way of saying that the platform believes that its $36 billion-plus in annual advertising revenue is still at the early stages of a long runway.

That is also reflected in YouTube’s conquering of what was once a flagship event of the broadcast TV era: upfront week. The annual spectacle, with thousands of media buyers and advertisers crisscrossing Manhattan to be wooed and pitched by TV networks, has already transformed into something more corporate. Disney pitched every piece of its media empire, not just ABC; Paramount exited the week altogether; and Netflix and Amazon shoved their way in as they seek more ad dollars.

But YouTube has settled in as the week’s culminating event, taking over Lincoln Center with its Brandcast event and delivering a show with more assuredness and confidence than its competitors, analog or digital, multiple media buyers said. This year’s show, presided over by Broski, saw MrBeast doing a stunt with former NFL stars Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman and Hot Ones host Sean Evans making an appearance. The platform, Mohan told the buyers in attendance, is the only place where viewership can be measured in billions, with a “B,” a scale unmatched by any competitor. The event concluded with a set from Lady Gaga, complete with costume changes and a full band. “Today, YouTube has become the epicenter of culture,” Mohan said. “And I don’t mean short-lived fads or a one-off hit show. I mean culture with a capital ‘C.’ The place where day after day, year after year, the events, conversations and voices that define the moment break through.”

Of course, YouTube’s immense scale is also the source of the most grumbling from its studio and streaming competitors. Many YouTube creators view the studio executives as gatekeepers, the old guard that once held sway over what got made and what didn’t. Studio executives, meanwhile, dismiss YouTube and its growth as something less than the sum of its parts. Sure, there are big channels operated by traditional media companies, and some creators are doing good work, but in terms of raw numbers, most content uploaded to the platform is anything but premium.

“There’s still a perception, particularly in the traditional space around YouTube and YouTube culture, that’s probably looked down upon,” one high-level source who plays in both worlds says. “I don’t think the audience gives a shit, or at least a segment of the audience, but I do think there’s a little bit of a hump to overcome there.”

Yes, Mark Rober is shooting rockets into space, and Kinigra Deon is filming original fantasy shows, but videos about fixing your dishwasher and a three-hour feed of a hike through a wooded trail are there right next to them. There are clips from Last Week Tonight but also clips from classic David Letterman episodes, baseball games from the 1970s, gamers playing Fortnite and New Year’s Eve ball drops from 1956.

It’s a hotbed of creativity “but it’s also, frankly, just a reflection of humanity,” Mohan says.

While a platform like HBO carefully curates its content, YouTube has something for everyone and bets that it can use its algorithm to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.

But the scale of the platform is also why many creators have sought to leverage their reach to move beyond it. “The value for [YouTube] is the platform over the individuals. No one individual, not even MrBeast, really moves the needle for them,” one source says.

It’s a big reason why creators are leaning into consumer products like snacks and skin care creams and why people like Mann and Ms. Rachel are also licensing their content to such platforms as Netflix and Samsung TV Plus. “I’ve always felt that it’s easier to turn an audience into dollars than dollars into an audience, and so you might as well start where someone already has an audience if you want to run a successful business,” one creator says. For creators, it’s about minimizing risk, though YouTube can (and does) frame it as a positive. “The beauty of the YouTube model is you control your own destiny,” Mohan says. “You own the content, you’re not licensing the content. It’s yours, you get to choose how you want to monetize it.”

Sitting on a stool on the stage in the Google New York office after the creator event, Mohan was asked by Max Klymenko, who hosts a show called Career Ladder, whether the emergence of “creators” as a career has changed his approach personally as an executive. Mohan responds in the affirmative, noting the studios that people like Deon and Mann have built. “It’s personally very important for me to not just continue to grow this creator ecosystem, but for it to actually be a viable, respectable and sustainable career path for lots of young people in this country and really, all over the world,” he says.

The moment Mohan realized that the combination of YouTube’s creators and the NFL’s live games could work well together was at a league owners meeting, where the CEO had brought Mark Rober to explain what he does to the attendees.

“All the NFL owners are there, Roger and his team are there, and all the young people there — the kids and the grandkids — they were obviously interested in the athletes, but they swarmed Mark rover as soon as he got off stage,” Mohan recalls. “For me, that was when it clicked, these YouTubers are a phenomenon into themselves … I knew at that moment that this bet between the NFL and YouTube was going to have this greater magic to it.”

Viewers of the Brazil game got a taste of what’s possible: “Watch With” parties saw creators provide their own live commentary, in something akin to ESPN’s Manningcast. It doesn’t take much to imagine a future where games have dozens, or even hundreds, of creator commentary options. The platform has also used its relationship to get creators access to the field, to locker rooms, to places that in the recent past would have been off-limits.

“I feel like the ecosystem is really blending, the creators have built a new lane in terms of the content they’re making, where each creator is their own production company and making their own sports content, and now they’re merging more and more with traditional sports,” says Jesser.

Many of YouTube’s most popular creators release sports-adjacent content weekly, from Dude Perfect to Deestroying, Jesser to iShowSpeed. But in a move that has raised the eyebrows of Hollywood executives, YouTube has been getting into business with the leagues more directly.

When YouTube cut a deal to pay the NFL about $2 billion annually for the NFL Sunday Ticket streaming service in 2022, it stunned the TV business, signaling that it was serious about sports – the last frontier of traditional TV domination. In addition to the NFL, sources say that YouTube has been in the mix for several major sports rights over the last year or so.

Mohan acknowledges that he was “nervous” ahead of the Brazil game. “It was a really big moment for YouTube, it was a really big moment for our partners in the NFL,” he recalls. Luckily, the telecast went off without any technical hitches, drawing a solid 17.3 million viewers. “I joined my wife and some friends at a barbecue at a neighbor’s house afterwards and just had this sense of relief in terms of how smooth and well things went.”

“They’ve been terrific partners. They brought us a new audience,” Goodell says. “They bring incredible production value. These creators are really an element that has been very well received by our fans — and new fans — people who want to get involved in the game.”

So why pay for exclusive rights and production costs, in contrast to almost all other content on the platform?

“The nice thing about sports is, if you use that term creator in the broadest sense, the NFL is a creator of content, it’s not something that we’re scripting,” Mohan says. “I think in a fundamental sense, it’s about the fact that we have hundreds of millions of sports fans on the platform, and it’s a really important vertical of content, and we want to be super-serving our fans.”

Indeed, the NFL may be the biggest programming on TV, but the league, like YouTube, wants more. More female fans, more international fans, and younger fans that can ensure that the league can thrive 50 years down the line.

And the league increasingly views the creator ecosystem that YouTube has sustained as a bridge to that younger audience. “I think teams and leagues see the value in the reach that content creators have,” says sports creator Katie Feeney. “The goal is always to build a new audience, to reach new eyes. I’m a Gen Z creator, my target demo is in that 18 to 24 demographic, which is a sweet spot for sports, and especially when you’re looking to build a new fan base, this is the new generation.”

“It’s very clear that the young fan in particular wants to consume the live game, is interested in the athletes, but oftentimes they want to consume the highlights, the postgame and pregame commentary during the week through their favorite YouTubers and creators,” says Mohan.

It’s a fact not lost on Goodell either. “The thing that always impresses me is how smart they are, how creative they are, and the detail they put into their production,” he says of the creators he has met with.

NFL games garner tens of millions of viewers every week, and the Super Bowl is a veritable national holiday, topping 100 million viewers handily year after year. The NBA has become a focal point of American culture, while the brutalism of UFC is appealing to a larger audience year after year.

All of those leagues (not to mention media partners like ESPN) have turned to YouTube as the home base for clips and highlights, but live games are the final frontier, the glue holding the traditional TV ecosystem together.

If YouTube does supplant what we think of as “TV” today, there’s a good chance that the Brazil game is a pivot point. And the platform’s creators, many of whom have felt the sting of the traditional studio system, certainly have no qualms about embracing that future, one that blends professional production and creator-driven content in surprising ways.

“Prior to [YouTube], the only way to get a show made was to walk into a room of people wearing suits, hope that they like it enough to give it a pilot, hope that they like the pilot enough to give it a season, hope that they put marketing budget behind it so people know to watch it,” says Michelle Khare, whose series, Challenge Accepted, pushes the boundaries of what is possible on the platform in terms of the quality of its production. “Systematically, that is a system that has failed a lot of people and only allowed so many stories to be told. I’m excited to be part of a future where the only barrier to entry is the upload button.”

This story appeared in the Oct. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.