More people now watch YouTube on their TVs than on their phones

The TV app has gotten some major upgrades in the past few years.

By Joe Allen Published February 11, 2025

YouTube

In its long history as a website, YouTube has never been closely associated with television. Now, though, the company’s CEO Neal Mohan revealed in their annual letter that users are watching more than 1 billion hours of YouTube on their TV every year.

According to Neilsen’s ratings information, YouTube has maintained its dominance as the most used streaming app for the past two years, and even made changes to its TV app so that it looked more like a regular streaming service. Among the significant changes that YouTube made to its app in 2024 was one that gives you the ability to pull up comments on one side of the screen while you watch the video on the other, much as you can in the mobile app. The app also added a “seasons” feature that makes it easier to navigate long-running series of videos in much the same way you might navigate

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“For more and more people, watching TV means watching YouTube,” Mohan wrote. “But the ‘new’ television doesn’t look like the ‘old’ television. It’s interactive and includes things like Shorts (yes, people watch them on TVs), podcasts, and live streams, right alongside the sports, sitcoms and talk shows people already love.”

YouTube TV, meanwhile, now has more than 8 million subscribers who are using it in lieu of paying for a cable subscription. Mohan added that the company is planning further improvements to YouTube TV, and will “continue to improve fan-favorite YouTube TV features, like Key Plays and multiview, and bring new benefits to YouTube Premium subscribers.”

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Joe Allen is a freelance culture writer based in upstate New York. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The…

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