The Future of Television just told you so. Again.
More years ago than we care to count here, early in our career in local television, we were focused on promoting and branding local stations. In one notable case, we were tasked with developing a new image for a dominant “low band” VHF station that routinely had an audience share in the mid-to-high 40s throughout much of its broadcast day. Meaning nearly half of all television sets in use in the market had this particular channel tuned in.
We joked at the time that local television sets must have had the tuning knob welded in place.
At this particular moment, we were well aware that a handful of stations had been calling themselves “The One and Only,” followed by the station’s channel position. This positioning had begun at Post-Newsweek Station’s flagship, WTOP-TV, circa 1974, and eventually spread to its other stations, including the then co-owned WPLG in Miami. Now a local news-focused independent station owned by Berkshire Hathaway, WPLG still calls itself “The One and Only.”
But our take in the early 1980s was not to directly copy “The One and Only”, but to be shorter and a bit more declarative. We decided to pitch the idea of building a station campaign centered on the more direct tagline “There’s Only One,” followed by the station’s call letters or channel number. We considered the idea very strong and felt pretty good about it when we made our case.
It was one of the more memorable large swings of our nascent career, and it bombed so badly that the scientists working on the Manhattan Project would have likely been impressed. In so many words, we were politely told that it would be much too strident and arrogant to have the station suggest that “There’s Only One.”
Fast-forward to this past week in 2026.
This week featured the annual television tradition known as “the Upfronts.” The series of days where NBC, Fox, CBS, and ABC each took their turn on various Manhattan stages to present their 2026-27 programming slates to a room full of media buyers and local station managers. The tone, by most accounts, was notably optimistic. Scripted programming seems to be making a modest comeback. Sports rights remain the architecture around which everything else is hung. A few new faces took the stage in new executive roles. Seth Meyers roasted his Comcast/NBC bosses at Radio City Music Hall. Jimmy Kimmel did the same at Disney/ABC’s presentation, comparing the networks to “a bunch of dirty, starving little chihuahuas under the table waiting for a chicken leg to drop.” It was a little like a man joking about the roof leaking while the living room fills with water. The overall vibe, if you squinted and held your breath, was something resembling confidence. Not exactly a victory lap, but not a funeral either.
Then YouTube showed up.
YouTube’s “Brandcast” didn’t arrive with a hint of apology or a whiff of defensive posturing. CEO Neal Mohan took the stage at Geffen Hall with the composure of someone who already knows how the game ends when he announced, “Welcome to the YouTube era.” The company has deployed the phrase “There’s Only One YouTube” for three consecutive years now, and what initially read as mostly chest-thumping is beginning to sound less like a boast and more like a geographic fact. When you hold 12.5% of all American television viewing (according to Nielsen), that figure puts you ahead of every broadcast network, every cable channel, and every other streaming service — you’re not really making an argument anymore. You’re reading the scoreboard.
A few years ago, the conventional wisdom treated YouTube as a phone screen, a laptop distraction, something the kids watched in their bedrooms. That story is no longer operative. The television set — the 65-inch one in the living room — has become YouTube’s primary screen. Viewing on connected TVs has outpaced mobile growth for several years running, and the platform now streams more than a billion hours of content daily on television sets worldwide. In the U.S., YouTube isn’t a digital platform that sometimes ends up on TV. It is a television platform, full stop.
That’s what the Brandcast was really selling to advertisers on Tuesday night: the living room. Not the algorithm, not the creator economy, not some futuristic vision of what media might look like. The actual television set in the actual home. YouTube got there, and it did so without holding a single FCC license.
Which brings us to the local broadcaster and the question nobody in that business particularly enjoys discussing.
If YouTube is now the dominant force on the largest screen in the American home, and if local television stations continue to serve their local content to local audiences, the question of why those stations maintain anything less than a full-throated YouTube presence is not unreasonable to ask. Local newscasts, morning shows, community franchises, the 6 o’clock block that used to anchor an entire evening’s viewing — where is all of that on YouTube, in full, uploaded consistently, available on the living room TV to anyone who wants it?
The honest answer is: barely anywhere, and for reasons the industry would rather not say out loud.
The economic model doesn’t cooperate. YouTube’s revenue share for standard channel monetization returns somewhere between $2 and $8 per thousand views for most general-content channels, with news content often coming in at the lower end of that range due to advertiser category sensitivities around news programming. A local station deploying an “all in” strategy for putting its content on YouTube would spend real money on staff time, rights clearances for any music or syndicated content, and workflow management. In turn, it would recover only a fraction of what it yields from the same content on broadcast. The math does not work.
But that framing misses the larger problem: ignoring YouTube doesn’t add up either.
Many local stations are still operating as though their primary distribution asset is the over-the-air or cable channel. For any viewer under 50 who has cut the cord — or more precisely, never bothered to attach it in the first place — its cable carriage might as well be the equivalent of sending a telegram. Its OTA signal may be faring a little better, given that it's free to receive, but the number of viewers who don’t even know how to receive channel 5, which is actually 30.1, is astonishing.
For most viewers, “watching television” means streaming video, and for the largest share of those viewers, that means watching YouTube.
The question is whether it’s the local station’s content or someone else’s. Every month, that question answers itself in YouTube’s favor while the station studies the monetization spreadsheet.
The industry's argument against full YouTube distribution is also partly a retransmission consent argument in disguise. Stations have spent twenty years building the leverage that forces MVPDs (cable and satellite operators) to pay for carriage. If the content is freely available on YouTube, the argument goes, it undermines the exclusivity on which retrans is built. And at present, that “retrans” money is what’s keeping most local television stations profitable.
There’s something to that argument — except the MVPD bundle is losing subscribers at a rate that makes retrans anything but a growth strategy. You do not preserve a burning building by refusing to open the windows.
What a serious YouTube strategy would require from a local broadcaster is not a revenue model that replaces broadcast economics. It would require accepting that YouTube is, at least for now, a reach-and-relationship investment — a way to stay in the living rooms of people who have already left the linear dial — with monetization that follows the audience, not the other way around. A few group owners have experimented at the margins. None have committed in the way the audience migration would actually warrant.
Forty-plus years ago, our pitch to use “There’s Only One” was swatted down by a boss we really enjoyed working for, when he pointed out, “This won’t work because we just aren’t the only one in town.”
YouTube spent this week telling the advertising industry again, politely but directly, when it comes to viewing in the living room (not to mention on every other screen), well, “There’s Only One.”
And while local television broadcasters would argue that YouTube isn’t yet “the one and only” place they need to be, can they really still afford not to be?
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