We are offering a limited year-end sale now that offers you savings of 75% at $1 a week. Don't miss out. Sign up now.Greetings!It's been a few years since I've watched the Oscars live, preferring instead stories or short videos to recap the winners and highlights. But even I took notice when seeing the announcement that the Academy Awards telecast would leave ABC — its home for more than 50 years — and head to YouTube in 2029. My initial reaction was like everyone else: This is yet another signal that broadcast television is in an irreversible decline. As our analysis put it, the announcement marked "the day network TV finally, truly died." But our Steve Pond had a different take from the perspective of the awards show itself, and surprisingly sees the potential opportunity in an Oscars reset. "Let’s face it, there’s something inherently troubling about the biggest night for theatrical films heading to a platform that has virtually nothing to do with theatrical," Pond writes. "But after years – or decades, really – of the Academy and ABC having a tug of war over what the show should be, how long it should last and which awards should be presented on the air, this could be an opportunity for the Oscars to work out for themselves what they want to be." As mentioned, I haven't really paid much attention to the Oscars, and I'm not alone. In 2025, the telecast drew 19.7 million viewers, a little more than half of the audience of 37.3 million it garnered 10 years ago. Even in the year before the pandemic, it drew an audience of 29.6 million, about 10 million more than this year. With enthusiasm dwindling, moving platforms and rethinking how the Oscars telecast could work in a streaming environment could be the shot in the arm it needs. As Pond notes, the Academy could just highlight the big awards in one program and find new ways to showcase the lower profile accolades, or lean in and go even bigger with a marathon telecast with all the awards you could hope for. Those changes, which the Academy will have more control over, are likely more appealing than ABC's demands to make the program shorter, faster and more capable of capturing linear TV's dwindling audience. YouTube offers a virtually unlimited space to suit what the Academy thinks will be the best way to present its awards. The good thing is the Academy has three years to figure things out. Roger Cheng 
If the Academy is looking for ideas of how to run a live broadcast on YouTube, you can look to how the platform handled its first-ever broadcast of a live NFL game ... 
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