In April 2017, Google launched YouTube TV in a few markets in the United States for the first time. Today, the company revealed in a blog post that although the Internet-based live TV service is still only available in the United States, it has exceeded 8 million paying users.
As Variety points out, this makes YouTube TV the largest Internet pay TV service by a huge margin, with the service starting at $72.99 per month, far more influential than second-place Hulu Plus Live TV, which only has 4.3 million subscribers.
One of the biggest reasons for YouTubeTV's growth will likely be the addition of the NFL Sunday Pass service in the fall of 2023. The first season of the service, which allows NFL fans to watch all Sunday afternoon games, just concluded. YouTubeTV also launched multi-viewing capabilities for sports events such as NFL Sunday Ticket in 2023, allowing users to watch up to four games on the screen at the same time.
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said in a blog post that more and more people are watching YouTube's overall content on big-screen TVs. He said that 1 billion hours of YouTube content are watched on television every day. In addition, YouTube has generated the most watch time among streaming services in the United States over the past 11 months, according to data provided by ratings service Nielsen.
Mohan also revealed that YouTube Shorts, a recently launched feature designed to compete with short video services such as TikTok, currently has more than 70 billion views per day. In addition, the number of YouTube channels offering short video services has increased by 50% in the past year.
Last week, Google revealed that the number of global users of YouTube Music and YouTube Premium (including free trial users) has now exceeded 100 million. YouTubeMusic offers ad-free music and music videos, while YouTube Premium includes all the features of YouTubeMusic and ad-free videos.