TV isn’t dying, YouTube EMEA VP Pedro Pina said at the Edinburgh TV Festival—it’s on the cusp of a new golden age.
In introducing the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival this year—akin to a State of the Union address for the U.K.’s media sector—Fatima Salaria, the festival’s chair, acknowledged that giving that vaunted position to Pedro Pina, YouTube’s EMEA VP, may have ruffled some feathers.
“Some people said we had let the fox into the hen house,” Salaria said. “You can see why. He represents a platform with enormous power over audiences, advertising, creators, and increasingly television itself. It’s a good line, but it’s also a bit convenient because YouTube didn’t do this to us while television sat innocently in the corner. Broadcasters put programs, clips, and talent on platforms. Producers built businesses there. Advertisers followed audiences there. Creators found communities and invented formats traditional television had often missed. Viewers moved between a drama, a podcast, a creator, and a YouTube channel without asking anyone in this room for permission. The boundaries we still argue about are the ones the audience mostly stopped caring about years ago. So, before we decide exactly what we think, let’s hear what Pedro’s got to say. There are real questions here about platform power, revenue, rights, data, and the future of public service media, but YouTube is also part of our world in a way it simply wasn’t a few years ago, and the MacTaggart should absolutely be the place where we hear directly from the people shaping this industry.”
The festival in the midst of its own evolution, moving to Manchester in 2027 after five decades in Edinburgh. The goal is to remain relevant to an industry in the midst of significant transformation.
“There’s a lot of talk about AI slop, but maybe the real warning is not that AI will make too much bad content,” Salaria said. “Maybe it’s that we start thinking that more content is the answer, because very soon there will be more content than any of us could watch in a thousand lifetimes. Volume is not the prize; choice is, and everyone in this room knows how much harder those choices get when your budgets are tight, and when there’s less room to be wrong. So perhaps the challenge for television isn’t to join the race for more; it’s to hold our nerve about what deserves to be made, and for me, that is what sits behind tonight—not simply whether YouTube is television, but what television becomes when the question is no longer ours alone to answer.”
Edinburgh TV Festival’s Advisory Chair Adam Hawkins—the director of documentary series at Netflix in the U.K.—spoke in his introduction to Pina’s address about the limitless opportunities for content creation today.
“The quality bar has never been higher, and audiences have never been more engaged. But here’s the thing I find truly exciting: it’s not just that the ceiling has risen; it’s that the floor has completely disappeared. The barrier to entry has never been lower. You no longer need an agent, a commission, or even an industry contact to build a television audience. This is the democratization of television, and it changes everything: who gets to make it, who gets to watch it, and who gets to matter.”
YouTube is television, Hawkins stressed, “not television’s scrappy younger cousin, not a distraction from proper television. It’s on our screens, it’s in our living rooms, and it’s watched by millions of people every single day. It is where culture is made, where careers are launched, and where the next generation of storytellers is finding an audience without asking anyone’s permission.”
Over his 45-minute address, Pina stressed the increasingly central role of the living room in YouTube viewing; the platform’s monetization and global expansion opportunities; and the deep, granular understanding you can get of your audience. The emergence of the creator economy is not a tragedy for the global content business, he said, arguing that democratized production, advances in technology, and the use of data and analytics are ushering in a new golden age of television.
Countering the narrative: YouTube is not the enemy.
There is a narrative about YouTube as it relates to the TV industry, and it’s not a great one, Pina said. “It goes something like this: ‘British television is under siege. For decades, the U.K. was a global powerhouse for creative genius and fearless reporting. Then foreign tech companies came along and tempted viewers away from good programming with low-quality clickbait. In the online free-for-all, misinformation thrives. The bottom has fallen out of the British creative economy because millennials and Gen Z are abandoning television for the siren song of the algorithm, for the labyrinth of endless scrolling. So, enjoy the likes of Panorama, Planet Earth, and It’s a Sin while you can, because the days of well-funded, high-quality TV in this country are numbered.’”
He called that assessment a “well-scripted tragedy,” with the celebrated U.K. TV industry as the fallen hero and social video as the aggressive conqueror. “It’s a powerful story. It’s an emotive story. The trouble is, it is not true.”
Pina ran through stats showing traditional TV still commands significant audiences in the U.K., as well as numbers indicating YouTube is increasingly driven by living room viewing, especially among the under-35 “smartphone generation,” he said.
“Now, I do not wish to play down any of the very real concerns I hear across the industry,” he said. “Viewing habits have changed dramatically, especially among under-35s. The majority of video watched in U.K. homes still comes from broadcasters, but when you focus on 16 to 34s, less than a quarter of what they’re choosing to watch is traditional broadcaster content. It would be easy to shake our heads and say they’re just scrolling through slop, but that’s not true. Personalized recommendations help them find more of what they enjoy, and the result is not a race-to-the-bottom churn of addictive rubbish.”
A lot of what is being consumed on YouTube does come from major broadcasters, studios and streamers, Pina went on to say. “So while it is true that traditional broadcast TV no longer has a monopoly on viewers’ attention, that does not mean that any form of online video now has the monopoly. It simply means there is no monopoly anymore. And from the viewer’s perspective, that is a very good thing indeed.”
You can’t resist the tide. And it’s not an either/or situation.
There is no going back; audiences won’t want to return to the days of limited options in the traditional television space. “But if we take a long view of human culture, we find no reason to assume that online video will supersede television as a form.”
Pina used the tremendous traction creator content got on YouTube around the World Cup as an example; in the U.K., most of that viewing happened outside the live match windows.
“We call that the game around the game. Online sports commentary doesn’t replace TV coverage; they exist side by side. This is what a healthy media ecosystem looks like: complementary forums playing different roles and pushing each other forward.”
Television will get left behind if it doesn’t adapt, Pina stressed. “Let’s not sugarcoat it. Things will have to change because the playing field TV once dominated has shifted, and the steady revenue streams and booming budgets built on the central position TV once held can no longer be relied upon.”
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