Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Will YouTube take it all? – the CRTC’s intriguing question for music streamers – leading news avoiders to water

Graphic from the Hollywood Reporter

November 1, 2025

It’s not exactly breaking news, but YouTube is taking over television. Or to put it more vividly, YouTube is threatening to storm the Alamo of television programming, live sports and scripted drama.

The Hollywood Reporter has a lengthy feature story about how that’s happening in the US where, in addition to YouTube’s mushrooming ecosystem of self-broadcasting “creator” YouTubers, the paid subscription service YouTubeTV is a much bigger player in premium television programming than it is in Canada.

The Reporter story begins by breathlessly anticipating that YouTubeTV might, someday soon, elbow its way into the inner circle of exclusive rights to broadcasting NFL games (currently parcelled out among Disney’s Fox and ESPN, Amazon Prime, Comcast and a few others).

But an even bigger breakout for YouTube would be joining the platinum club of streamers like Netflix, Disney, Amazon and Paramount who dominate the market for premium scripted drama.

YouTube’s relationships with a seemingly endless parade of YouTuber stars could morph into something very different from, and competitive with, the fraternity of big studios and streamers, i.e Hollywood.

As AI drives down production costs for premium video, and advertising slowly migrates from television drama to the most successful YouTubers, we could witness an explosion of independent producers of scripted drama who toggle back and forth between selling to the big streamers or else broadcasting on their own YouTube channel.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan is so cocky that the Reporter quotes him proclaiming “today, YouTube has become the epicentre of culture. 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.”

The Reporter doesn’t put it this way, but YouTube is uniquely positioned to offer audiences both premium and non-premium content with an unbeatable distribution algorithm.  

What the Reporter story doesn’t do is explore the deeper ideas about video consumption that media futurist Doug Shapiro is talking about in his most recent blog post “Big Media’s Structural Disadvantage”. 

A dumbed down summary of Shapiro’s column is that the cheaply produced videos flooding YouTube and social media apps make our brains happy because it’s both addictive and passive, like a getaway spa session: we don’t have to expend energy (or money) finding just the right kind of premium content, we just lay there.

Shapiro’s argument is that tut-tutting about quality is a waste of time, this shift in audience attention is happening and the advertising dollars are following.

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The CRTC has this handy way of telling you what’s on the commissioners’ collective mind when it publishes a post-hearing list of questions for industry and cultural groups to answer. What the questions tell you is where the public record is light on key issues and that the Commission wants to fill those gaps.

The CRTC just finished public hearings on the full implementation of the Online Streaming Act for the foreign audio streamers who were previously ordered by the Commission to make a cash downpayment of five per cent of revenues to Canadian media funds for music and radio news (the streamers appealed the order to Federal Court and we’re waiting for the ruling).

One of the intriguing ideas that Commissioner Bram Abramson kept raising during the hearings was a concept he called “pay or play.”

The idea he’s running up the flagpole is that each streamer might be allowed to make trade-offs of direct expenditures on Canadian audio content in favour of making special efforts to give prominence to Canadian content on its services, something that’s worth money to music labels and artists and hypothetically is a cost to audio streamers. 

Abramson is only one of five commissioners deliberating on the audio file, but in question 20 of the CRTC’s list the commissioners ask “what kind of exchange rate between financial contributions and Canadian content aired would be appropriate? For example, for every 1% increase or decrease from a hypothetical baseline percentage of Canadian content, what should be the corresponding percentage or dollar-value change in the required financial contribution?” (Emphasis added)

As a speculative example, if the Commission expects Spotify to spend 30% of its Canadian revenues on Canadian content (including the 5% cash contribution to media funds) Spotify could reduce the 30% to 15% if it made heroic efforts to increase listening to Canadian songs through more recommendations or song selection for playlists.

More radically, the Commission might be thinking of reducing Spotify’s 5% media fund contributions by, say 1%, if it ups its streams of Canadian music from the current 10% of its top 10,000 songs to something like 20%.

That’s analogous to what the Commission already did with video content. Last year the Commission said it will allow Netflix to reduce its 2% cash contribution to the Canada Media Fund —-a contribution that Netflix appealed to Federal Court—-to 0.5% by using the money to buy more Canadian shows for its streaming service.

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And now for something completely different: news subsidies and news consumers.

When writing about the sustainability of news organizations, I always think about the importance of news outlets making information about current affairs available to Canadians who aren’t news junkies.

My thinking is undoubtedly too binary, but you could divide the world into those who are interested enough in current affairs to pay for news, or at least coaxed into doing so, and those who say to themselves “if news is important, it will find me.”

If the news avoiders aren’t engaged with current affairs —unless it’s free, intriguing and right in front of them— our democracy is kind of screwed.

Cue this new poll conducted by the Globe Strategy Group in the US, summarized by Joshua Benton in Nieman Lab. 

The poll divides Americans into active and passive news consumers and it would be fascinating if someone ran the same poll in Canada. The results don’t reveal a single litmus test that predicts who’s a news junkie and who’s not, but the results offer signposts to where the less engaged, passive consumers are to be found.

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This week MediaPolicy posted an update on the Parliamentary journey of Bill S-209, the age verification law aimed at protecting children from pornography. Judging from the readership numbers (thanks to Reddit), folks are interested in this law which also raises issues of viewer privacy.

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2025.