The video-sharing platform is now the second most-watched “TV” service in the UK, having overtaken ITV. It now has the BBC in its sights, Ofcom’s 2025 Media Nations survey found.
The challenge faced by traditional broadcasters is stark, with less than half of 16-24-year-olds now watching broadcast TV on a weekly basis.
Younger adults aged 16 to 34 are driving the trend, watching 18 minutes of YouTube a day on TV, while one in five children aged four to 15 head straight to the app as soon as they turn the set on. If that generation never gets into the habit of looking for BBC shows, the broadcaster’s future could be bleak.
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“But we’re also seeing signs that older adults are turning to the platform as part of their daily media diet too.”
But the BBC currently prefers to run taster clips of its programmes on YouTube while guiding on-demand viewers to its own iPlayer to watch complete shows.
YouTube was the second-most-watched media service (14 per cent) ahead of ITV (12 per cent), Ofcom found.
The BBC is facing a pincer threat from YouTube, which is free, and subscription services like Netflix, which is now a fixture in 17.4 million UK households (59 per cent).
Netflix drama Adolescence topped the most-watched programmes of 2025 up to end of March (Ofcom)
Although the BBC is cautious about embracing YouTube, Director-General Tim Davie said in May that the BBC wants to “dramatically increase” its news presence on the platform and is “already making progress” on this front.
Netflix, with its £15bn programming budget, attracts subscribers through the kind of high-end drama the BBC and other terrestrial broadcasters can no longer fund without help from international partners.
The question of sports
Despite the increased competition, audience reach for the BBC’s TV channels actually held up well in 2024, Ofcom found.
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The 2024 men’s Euros football (12.5 million watched the England v Spain final) and the Olympics helped the BBC stabilise its audience.
Streamers are eating into its sport portfolio, with Warner Brothers Discovery paying €1.3bn for “all you can eat” European TV and digital rights to the Olympic Games.
BBC insiders believe the £14.50 monthly cost of the licence fee will look increasingly good value as the streamers consistently raise their prices, in order to cover their multi-billion-dollar programming investment.
The proportion of Netflix subscribers using its “standard with ads” £5.99 subscription tier increased sharply to 28 per cent in the first quarter of 2025, compared to 13 per cent in Q1 2024.
“While BBC iPlayer was the UK’s fastest-growing long-form video-on-demand service in 2024/25, we know that audience needs are rapidly changing, and so we continue to transform what we do on digital platforms.”
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