For the previous 12 months, the top-watched streaming service on televisions world wide has not been trade leaders like Netflix, Hulu, or Disney+ — it has been YouTube.

Knowledge insights big Nielsen introduced that, as of at present, YouTube has been the highest streaming platform by watch time for one full yr. Globally, viewers watch a mean of greater than 1 billion hours of YouTube content material on their TVs day by day. This consists of not solely long-form YouTube content material however Youtube Shorts as effectively. In a weblog put up, YouTube shared that views of Shorts on linked TVs grew by greater than 100% from January to September 2023.

The Nielsen stats didn’t embrace knowledge from YouTubeTV, a separate app for streaming reside tv.

It’s inconceivable for streamers to compete with huge expense of YouTube’s content material library. For instance, greater than 500 hours of video was uploaded to YouTube each minute in 2022. That is greater than 260 million hours of video yearly. Netflix, by comparability, has an estimated 18,000 titles, although the precise quantity out there to viewers varies by area.

Netflix nonetheless holds the crown for the top-watched title for January — Idiot Me As soon as — which was seen for six.5 billion minutes. Bluey, on Disney+, and Reacher, on Amazon Prime Video, clocked in with 5.5 billion minutes and 4.3 billion minutes, respectively.

However if you happen to break down these stats, YouTube really is not that far behind. Idiot Me As soon as is an eight-part Netflix collection with episodes working between 35 and 56 minutes. However simply one of many most-watched movies on YouTube from January, MrBeast’s “$1 vs $250,000,000 Personal Island!”, has 136 million views and a 17-minute run time, which implies the full watch time for that single video may very well be as a lot as 2.3 billion minutes. Make that into an eight-part collection, and also you’re greater than 18 billion minutes of watch time for episodes lower than 20 minutes lengthy.