The last Oscars on network television are now countable on one hand. YouTube will replace ABC as the exclusive worldwide broadcaster of the Academy Awards beginning with the 101st ceremony in 2029, under a deal announced December 17, 2025, that runs through 2033. The 98th Academy Awards - held yesterday, March 15, 2026, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood - offered a preview of what that transition looks like. Four official YouTube livestreams ran alongside the ABC telecast, covering the red carpet, an ASL-interpreted feed, the Governors Ball engraving station, and the Vanity Fair Oscar Party. Over 3 billion views of Oscars-related content accumulated on YouTube over the prior 12 months, with more than 250,000 uploads.

That 3 billion figure is not just a vanity metric. It represents a massive, fragmented audience engaging with the Oscars across tens of thousands of creator channels - commentary, predictions, reactions, clips, reviews - that YouTube can monetise through programmatic advertising infrastructure. It is a fundamentally different proposition from the single linear broadcast that ABC has offered since 1960. And for media buyers who currently write seven-figure cheques for 30-second spots during the ceremony, the shift demands rethinking how Oscars-adjacent inventory is planned, purchased and measured.

The ceremony itself delivered plenty of drama. Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another won six Oscars, including best picture, while Ryan Coogler's Sinners earned four - including a barrier-breaking win in cinematography. But the bigger story for the advertising industry may be what happened around the show, not on its stage.

The advertising context: a market in transition

The Oscars audience - 19.69 million viewers in 2025 - remains among the largest simultaneous audiences on American television. Yet that figure has declined substantially from its 2014 peak of 43.7 million. The ceremony's move to YouTube in 2029 arrives at a moment when connected television advertising is growing faster than any other segment, and when the infrastructure to serve, measure and optimise ads in streaming environments is maturing rapidly.

Consider the numbers. YouTube's advertising revenue reached approximately $36.1 billion in 2024, yet its growth rate has decelerated from 45.9% in 2021 to 12.5% in 2025. That slowdown partly explains YouTube's aggressive pursuit of premium live events like the Oscars, the NFL and the NBA - content that commands the kind of simultaneous mass audiences and premium CPMs the platform needs to sustain growth. YouTube already streamed its first free global NFL game in September 2025, and YouTube TV launched more than 10 genre-based subscription packages in early 2026, including a dedicated sports plan with ESPN networks.

The broader connected TV market is expanding alongside YouTube's ambitions. CTV's share of media budgets doubled from 14% in 2023 to 28% in 2025, and 43% of advertisers managing budgets exceeding $1 million plan to increase addressable TV spending in 2026. Nielsen's 2026 Upfront Planning Guide revealed that streaming now commands 66.7% of ad-supported TV viewing time among adults aged 18 to 49 - a figure that underscores why the Oscars' eventual migration to YouTube aligns with where younger audiences already spend their viewing hours.

Measurement infrastructure is keeping pace. Teads partnered with Google TV in February 2026 to expand HomeScreen advertising across 500 million devices globally. IAB Tech Lab published standardised guidelines for six CTV ad formatsin December 2025 - including pause ads, menu ads, overlay ads and screensaver ads - addressing the fragmentation that has long impeded programmatic scalability in streaming environments. For the Oscars specifically, YouTube already offers QR codes in non-skippable ads on connected TV through Display & Video 360's Instant Reserve function, creating direct response pathways from the television screen to mobile devices.

What does this mean in practice? When the Oscars move to YouTube, advertisers will not simply buy a 30-second slot during a three-hour broadcast. They will be buying into an ecosystem - the ceremony itself, the surrounding creator commentary, the clips and highlights that circulate for weeks afterward. The planning horizon shifts from a single primetime buy to a sustained campaign across programmatic, creator and premium inventory. Whether YouTube's infrastructure can deliver the same certainty of reach and measurement that linear television provided remains an open question - but the direction of travel is clear.

On the stage: Anderson's long-awaited triumph

While the advertising industry was processing structural implications, the Dolby Theatre was processing a more immediate spectacle. One Battle After Another - Paul Thomas Anderson's multi-generational political thriller about a washed-up activist battling old adversaries to protect his daughter - dominated the evening with six wins. Anderson took home best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay. Sean Penn won best supporting actor (though he was absent from the ceremony). Andy Jurgensen won best film editing. And Cassandra Kulukundis received the inaugural Oscar for best achievement in casting, a new competitive category and the first introduced by the Academy since best animated feature in 2002.

Before Sunday, Anderson had never won an Academy Award. IndieWire reported this was his fourth best director nomination and his first win in any Oscar category - a remarkable drought for a filmmaker whose body of work spans from Boogie Nights and Magnolia through There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread. "You make a guy work hard for one of these, I really appreciate it," Anderson said upon accepting the directing award, as captured by Yahoo News. He dedicated the win to the late Adam Somner, a longtime collaborator: "He's in a really big bar up in the sky right now. He's having a gin and tonic, and he is so happy."

The film was produced and distributed by Warner Bros. - a detail that carries its own advertising industry significance. Warner Bros. collected 11 statuettes across the evening, Deadline reported. The studio currently sits at the centre of a major acquisition contest: Paramount formally announced its agreement to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery on February 27, 2026, with plans to merge Paramount+ and HBO Max into a single streaming platform with approximately 200 million subscribers. The combined entity would reshape connected TV advertising inventory at a scale that rivals YouTube and Netflix.

Sinners shatters barriers - and a nomination record

Ryan Coogler's Sinners arrived at the ceremony as the most nominated film in Oscar history. Its 16 nominations - announced on January 22, 2026 - surpassed the 14-nomination record held jointly by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997) and La La Land (2016). Set in 1932 in the Jim Crow South, the film follows twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan who return to their Mississippi hometown to open a juke joint, only to confront vampires drawn by the otherworldly talent of a young blues prodigy. According to Britannica, the film grossed nearly $370 million worldwide on an approximately $100 million budget, with a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 429 critic reviews.

Sinners won four Oscars, and two of those wins made history. Autumn Durald Arkapaw won best cinematography - becoming the first woman and first person of colour to win in the category across 98 years of the Academy Awards. Only three women had ever been nominated before: Rachel Morrison for Mudbound in 2018, Ari Wegner for The Power of the Dog in 2021, and Mandy Walker for Elvis in 2022. None had won. According to Variety, Arkapaw had missed every precursor award heading into Oscar night, losing at the BAFTAs and both the British and American Societies of Cinematographers. The upset stunned many observers.

"I really want all the women in the room to stand up," Arkapaw said during her speech, NBC News reported. "Because I feel like I don't get here without you guys." Backstage, she told the Hollywood Reporter: "A lot of little girls that look like me will sleep really well tonight. Just being onstage, getting this award for a movie like that, will change so many girls' lives because they'll be inspired when they weren't before."

Arkapaw, who is of Filipino and African American Creole descent, also broke technical ground on the production. She was the first female cinematographer to shoot on IMAX 65mm and Ultra Panavision 70, and Sinners was the first film released combining both formats - a dual aspect ratio approach that gave the film its distinctive visual signature.

Jordan won best actor for his dual performance as the twins Smoke and Stack. It was his first Oscar nomination and his first win. In an emotional speech captured by Yahoo News, he thanked the Black actors who preceded him - "Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker, Will Smith, amongst the greats." In the press room, he reflected on the competitive nature of the industry: "There is a selfishness in understanding that in your craft and in your industry, this is a pinnacle. That competitiveness - you do want that. But at the same time, what's for you is for you."

Coogler won best original screenplay - his first career Oscar - while Ludwig Goransson collected best original score, his third Academy Award for composing and his second for a Coogler collaboration following Black Panther.

Buckley, Madigan and other winners

Jessie Buckley won best actress for her portrayal of Agnes Shakespeare in Hamnet, directed by Chloe Zhao, completing a clean sweep of the major awards season trophies after taking equivalent prizes at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, SAG Actor Awards and BAFTAs. E! News reported that the 36-year-old became the first Irish woman to win the best actress Oscar. "Ireland bought them flights," she said of her family's attendance, drawing laughter from the audience.

Amy Madigan won best supporting actress for her role as the terrifying Aunt Gladys in the horror film Weapons. As the Irish Times noted, the win came 40 years after her first nomination, for Twice in a Lifetime in 1986. Horror performances rarely receive Oscar recognition in acting categories - but the Academy has engaged more seriously with genre filmmaking in recent years, a shift that intensified with The Substance's best picture nomination the prior year.

Netflix's KPop Demon Hunters collected two Oscars: best animated feature and best original song for "Golden," which became the first K-pop song to win in the category. According to the South China Morning Post, Sony Pictures developed and produced the film but sold it to Netflix rather than giving it a theatrical release. On the streaming platform, it became a cultural phenomenon. The song alone accumulated 72.3 million views on YouTube's global charts during the week of December 26, 2025, to January 1, 2026 - another data point illustrating how YouTube functions as the de facto distribution layer for entertainment content, even when that content originates on a rival platform.

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein won three technical Oscars. Avatar: Fire and Ash took best visual effects. F1 won best sound. Norway's Sentimental Value won best international feature film. Mr. Nobody Against Putin - a film about a Russian schoolteacher documenting student indoctrination to support Russia's war with Ukraine - won best documentary feature. In a rare occurrence, two films tied for best live action short: The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva.

The AI elephant in the room

Host Conan O'Brien, returning for a second consecutive year, wove a thread through the evening that connected the ceremony's celebration of human artistry to the industry's anxiety about automation. "We pay tribute tonight, not just to film, but to the ideals of global artistry, collaboration, patience, resilience and that rarest of qualities today - optimism," he said in his opening monologue, the South China Morning Post reported.

He joked that by the following year his hosting duties would be assumed by "a Waymo in a tux." Presenter Will Arnett was more direct when introducing the animation awards: "Tonight we are celebrating people, not AI, because animation - it's more than a prompt," he said, as Al Jazeera reported.

That anxiety is not confined to Hollywood's creative community. The advertising industry is grappling with the same tension. A Mediaocean survey of 320 marketing professionals found that 54% plan to increase spending on AI media platforms in 2026, while 42% simultaneously struggle with data quality issues preventing broader AI implementation. Criteo became the first ad tech partner in OpenAI's ChatGPT advertising pilot in March 2026, connecting 17,000 advertisers to ChatGPT's Free and Go tiers in the United States. Users referred to retail websites from LLM platforms convert at approximately 1.5 times the rate of other referral channels, based on Criteo's data from 500 US retailers.

Meanwhile, Google announced a March 23, 2026, NewFront event dedicated to showcasing how its Gemini AI models are being embedded across Google Marketing Platform, with Display & Video 360 and CTV advertising among the focal points. The event - scheduled just eight days after the Oscars ceremony - underscores how closely intertwined the entertainment and advertising industries have become. The same AI models that worried Conan O'Brien on the Dolby Theatre stage are being deployed to target, optimise and measure the ads that will eventually surround the Oscars on YouTube.

It is a fitting paradox for a ceremony that celebrated human craft while the technology infrastructure around it accelerated in a different direction entirely.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, YouTube (Google), ABC, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael B. Jordan, Jessie Buckley, Ryan Coogler, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, and the media buying community navigating a structural shift in how premium live events reach audiences.

What: The 98th Academy Awards ceremony, in which One Battle After Another won six Oscars and Sinners won four - including the first-ever best cinematography prize for a woman. The ceremony represented one of the final Oscars on ABC before YouTube takes over exclusive worldwide broadcast rights in 2029, a transition with significant implications for connected TV advertising strategy, programmatic buying and measurement.

When: Sunday, March 15, 2026, honouring films released in 2025. The YouTube broadcast rights deal was announced December 17, 2025, and takes effect with the 101st ceremony in 2029 through 2033.

Where: The Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood, Los Angeles. The ceremony was broadcast on ABC with four supplemental YouTube livestreams. From 2029, the ceremony will be available exclusively on YouTube worldwide.

Why: The ceremony marked a pivot point where Hollywood's most prestigious awards event began its visible transition from legacy broadcast television to digital streaming infrastructure. For the advertising industry, the shift coincides with CTV ad budgets doubling, Nielsen data showing streaming dominates younger demographics, and AI-powered advertising tools entering mainstream deployment - trends that collectively reshape how premium live entertainment content is monetised, measured and planned against.

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