Established in 2022, YouTube’s Primetime Channels feature was among a number of one-stop, third-party content hubs that emerged following the success of Amazon Prime Video Channels.
Until now, YouTube’s “channels” offering was only available via the Movies and TV tab of the YouTube app, making it harder to find and limiting its appeal.
But that’s all about to change thanks to a Netflix-like app redesign that will put Primetime Channels on the YouTube homepage, according to a report in The Information.
Primetime Channels lets users sign up and pay for popular third-party streaming apps including Max, Paramount+ and Crunchyroll without ever leaving the YouTube app.
The business strategy has been a win-win for Amazon for almost a decade. Some subscription streaming services get the bulk of their distribution through Prime Video Channels. Notably, according to data just released by research company Antenna, Apple TV+ received 25% of its December signups through Amazon’s market, capturing 1.5 million in Q2024, even though the SVOD had only been available in Prime Video Channels for less than two months at that point.
For Amazon, not only does Channels keep users engaged and on its shopping app, the company shares 50% of subscription revenue from smaller streamers that are unable to leverage a discount.
Beyond YouTube, competitors including Apple and Roku have deployed similar strategies. For its part, YouTube had stopped adding services to its Channels mix, as it reportedly struggled with how to disaggregate third-party content onto the homepage of its app. But it appears to have solved this technical issue via the redesign.
“The vision is that when you come to our [TV] app and you’re looking for a show, it’ll just blend away whether that show is from a Primetime Channel or that show is from a [YouTube] creator,” Kurt Wilms, YouTube’s senior director of product management, told The Information.
Meanwhile, YouTube has also seems to be more aggressive in advertising content available via subscriptions on Primetime Channels, according to anecdotal observations by TVREV’s Alan Wolk.
The strategy of integrating premium subscription-streaming content alongside all the podcasts and user-generated videos makes a lot of sense, given YouTube’s growing dominance in connected TV. According to Nielsen’s latest The Gauge tracker for January, YouTube accounted for nearly 11% of all U.S. TV viewing that month.
