It’s Official, YouTube Is The Future Of Television

YouTube has confirmed its status as the future of television this week, with an unprecedented deal that shores up its position as the ultimate power broker of small-screen entertainment. The video platform has already had a bumper 2026, especially in light of its domination of FIFA World Cup coverage across the world in June and July.

Now the Alphabet-owned content provider has confirmed an agreement which will make NBCUniversal’s TV streaming platform Peacock an integrated part of its premium subscription package. Until now, YouTube Premium has simply afforded subscribers ad-free viewing and other in-app perks, without access to extra content.

Meanwhile, the separate YouTube TV subscription has already established itself as one of the best streaming services for watching live TV, reflecting YouTube’s growth as an influential stakeholder in the television industry overall. The company’s deal with Peacock further consolidates its position as an industry leader that’s well-placed to become TV’s dominant force in the coming decade.

YouTube’s platform-sharing agreement with NBC Universal is also just the latest in a series of TV streaming bundle launches over the past couple of years, as digital media giants look to combat subscription fatigue among viewers and unsustainable production costs by pooling their content. The best streaming bundles out there today are likely just a foretaste of what’s to come.

YouTube’s Peacock Deal Has Confirmed Its Status As The Future Of Television

Original SR Image by Shawn Lealos

YouTube Premium’s subscription partnership with Peacock reinforces the sense that the world’s biggest video streaming platform is going to take over television. The deal between YouTube and NBCUniversal means that Peacock will now be included as a free add-on to the content giant’s premium subscription service.

In certain countries outside the United States, the international equivalents of Peacock such as Universal+ and Hayu serve as the add-on included with YouTube Premium. Although it isn’t yet clear when the partnership will commence in practice, its announcement alone has thrown down the gauntlet to the entire TV industry.

The likes of Netflix and Amazon will be scrambling to react to what YouTube has just done. While these two companies ostensibly dominate TV streaming, they’ve actually fallen behind YouTube in terms of average viewership over the past 12 months, according to research conducted by TV analytics firm Digital i.

In 2025, the average amount of time users worldwide spent watching YouTube increased to 99 minutes per day. Meanwhile, the corresponding average for users of its nearest rival in this metric, Netflix, fell to 93 minutes per day. What’s more, the percentage of YouTube viewing time ascribed to television increased from 28% to 35%.

It’s no wonder that Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos was warning both his shareholders and industry regulators that YouTube isn’t just “a bunch of cat videos” during an interview with Politico back in March. Alphabet’s content-creating video platform is now his company’s biggest TV streaming rival.

If the upward trajectory of its viewing figures in relation to Netflix, Prime Video, and other streaming platforms continues over the coming years, with the all-round financial muscle and technical prowess of Google behind it, YouTube could begin to monopolize TV content globally in ways we’ve never seen before.

Streaming Has Entered The Age Of Bundling And Platform-Sharing

At the same time as reflecting YouTube’s powerful position in the TV industry, its deal with Peacock mirrors a broader trend taking place across streaming. An enormous amount of high-quality television content has been produced for streaming platforms over the past decade, with much of it gatekept behind a wall-garden subscription model.

Amid a climate of increasingly ruthless cost-cutting and risk aversion, the major streaming companies are realizing that they add value to their platforms cheaply by buying secondary rights to TV series on rival platforms, and repackaging it as something new for their own subscribers.

We’ve even seen Netflix take this step recently with a Prime Video original sci-fi show, The Man in the High Castle. It seems that these two streaming giants are willing to put their bitter rivalry aside in the case of something mutually profitable.

The other streaming model that’s going to become increasingly prevalent in the second half of the 2020s is bundling. In this model, a third-party subscription platform bundles together multiple content providers into a single affordable package. As a result, each of the content providers get their own cut of the subscription fee paid for the bundle.

While Disney+, Hulu and ESPN have long been available via the same subscription bundle, Amazon and Apple TV have recently begun offering multiplatform bundles of their own. For instance, Prime Video launched its Hayu and StackTV bundle in Canada on October 30 2024, while the Apple TV and Peacock Bundle was rolled out in October 2025.

YouTube is effectively following this bundling model by integrating Peacock into its own Premium subscription services, although it’s bundling access to a single TV streamer together with its own platform’s top-tier features, rather than access to multiple outside content providers. But it already ventured into the world of bundling long ago, by offering various different YouTube TV subscription packages.

Bundling and platform-sharing are key to projections that streaming profits will surpass $200 billion by 2030. Under these circumstances, YouTube is in prime position to collect the spoils of the previous era’s streaming wars.

YouTube Is Now TV’s Ultimate Power Broker

Due to its abundance of low-grade, short-form, amateur content and lack of quality control, YouTube has always been treated with dismissive condescension by its streaming rivals, as well as television’s traditional big hitters. But almost all of them are now flocking to do deals with the Alphabet company, as it surges ahead of them in the market of monetized viewership.

Last November, Disney struck a deal with YouTube TV which allowed ABC and ESPN to return more-or-less on YouTube’s terms. That came little more than a month after NBCUniversal and YouTube TV ended their feud, which paved the way for this week’s deal between Peacock and YouTube Premium.

When it comes to the future of television, YouTube holds all the cards. It managed to attract over 1.7 billion unique viewers to its coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup (via YouTube Official Blog), next to which the figures for all other platforms combined pale into insignificance.

Its dominant position in the global TV streaming market will take time to consolidate, given the size of its fellow new-media rivals. But make no mistake, YouTube is looking like an outright winner in the long run.

Sources: Digital i; Politico; YouTube Official Blog