If the BBC tries to ape YouTube, then we all lose

Google’s online platform is now the UK’s second-most popular choice for video viewing. But the corporation should resist trying too hard to compete

- Nick Hilton

“YouTube is the biggest beast in the attentional infrastructure of modern media,” Amol Rajan, presenter of Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, announced this week. Listeners around the country - the older ones, at least - must have been left perplexed. What is the “attentional infrastructure”? And isn’t

YouTube just a website for sharing videos of kittens mewing or postoperative children high on trace sedatives?

No. According to the media regulator Ofcom, YouTube is now the second-most watched service in the UK, ahead of ITV and behind only the BBC. Linear TV - the old tradition of live broadcast - has been staving off doom-mongers for the past decade but now stands on a precipice. Generations Z and Alpha (the youngest set of preteen media consumers) have already migrated overwhelmingly to streaming, whether via video sharing platforms (such as YouTube) or subscription video-on-demand services (such as Netflix). The former is now the premier TV destination among the fresh-faced four-to-15 demographic.

As the Today programme showed, there will undoubtedly be some at New Broadcasting House and ITV HQ who are getting antsy about this digital coup d’état. But Ofcom’s latest report is only the latest glance at a gradual, longstanding shift in the way that people view television. There have always been inflection points: the launches of ITV in 1955 and Channel 4 in 1982; the introduction of Sky in 1989 and digital terrestrial in 1998; Netflix’s arrival in the UK in 2012. Since John Logie Baird’s first TV broadcast in 1926, the technology has been (somewhat ironically) charting a linear trajectory away from linearity. And the diversifying of content providers has increasingly coincided with the arrival of more flexible viewing options. YouTube has overtaken ITV to become the country's second-most popular media broadcaster (Getty/iStock)