I’m currently rewatching Please Like Me with my friend Jacob, which is how I discovered that YouTube has apparently become a streaming service now.
Obviously YouTube has technically been a streaming service for a very long time. Video goes in. Video comes out. Streaming has occurred.
But that’s not what I mean.
I mean YouTube has somehow accumulated so many different kinds of television that opening the app on a TV now feels less like visiting a website and more like walking into a flea market where several incompatible versions of the entertainment industry have rented tables.
There’s normal YouTube. People talking directly into cameras. Video essays. Podcasts that have cameras for some reason. Game footage. Music videos. A very serious investigation into whether 2015 was Nintendo’s worst year ever.
There are also movies.
There are entire television shows.
There are live television channels.
There are sports.
There are clips uploaded by networks, old episodes uploaded by networks, and old episodes uploaded by somebody whose continued existence probably depends on nobody at a network noticing them.
And increasingly, there are actual streaming subscriptions living inside YouTube. YouTube says it now offers more than 50 Primetime Channels, including HBO Max, Paramount+, FOX One, and NFL Sunday Ticket. Peacock moved in this summer, too, so NBC shows, Bravo, Universal movies, and live sports can now occupy the same app as a six-hour compilation about discontinued game consoles. (YouTube Help, YouTube Blog)
Netflix would very much like you to think of Netflix as television.
Disney+ is Disney.
Peacock is NBC.
YouTube is apparently everything television has ever been, plus whatever I became curious about four minutes ago.
That is a fundamentally different proposition.
according to my watch history, “television” is now a psychological condition
I looked at my recent YouTube history because I wanted to see whether my impression of the service was accurate.
It was worse than I thought.
My recent viewing begins with a Daily Show clip about pardons, followed by three videos about Nintendo’s difficult relationship with 2015, the 3DS, and Wii U games ported to the Switch.
Then Task Mistress.
Then a Tomb Raider presentation from Gamescom.
Then a segment from This Morning called Meet The Man With Hands 10 Times Bigger Than Yours!
Then orcas.
Then a Graham Norton tribute to Dolly Parton, followed immediately by Kylie Sonique Love’s “Do It Like Dolly.”
Then a Jim Cornette omnibus, a full episode of The Big Fat Quiz, another episode of Task Mistress, and Bob the Drag Queen ranking reality television fights.
No television network has ever assembled that schedule because a television network would be investigated.
YouTube looked at all of those things and said: yes, this is one viewer. We can work with this.
The categories stop meaning anything after a while. Is a three-hour Scott the Woz compilation a television show, a podcast, a documentary, or the audiovisual equivalent of leaving a box fan running while I do something else? Is Bob the Drag Queen playing a Roblox animal hospital a game stream or a sitcom? Is The Big Fat Quiz television if I watch it through an official upload on the same service where I just learned that somebody put Linux on an Android phone?
At some point the answer becomes: who cares, it’s on the big rectangle and I am watching it.
Streaming services usually organize themselves around genre. Comedy. Drama. Reality. Documentary. Action.
My actual YouTube genres appear to be:
- Nintendo made a decision several years ago, and we are still processing it
- professional wrestling was occasionally terrible, please explain for 94 minutes
- drag queens interacting with video games or one another
- somebody is doing something inadvisable with food
- obsolete consumer technology remembered at exhausting length
- a science question I did not have until the thumbnail asked it
- British television I can watch without opening another app
- three hours of a familiar person talking so the apartment is not silent
Netflix does not have a row called Because You Watched Why Growing Pink Pineapples Is Illegal.
YouTube understands that it should.
youtube has one enormous advantage: it already lives on everything
Every streaming company spent the last decade trying to convince us to download another app.
YouTube did not have to do that.
YouTube was already there.
It’s on the television, phone, tablet, Xbox, Switch, and probably the refrigerator if Samsung believes it can make me watch a preroll ad while getting shredded cheese.
It is the one video app I can safely assume exists on whatever glowing rectangle happens to be nearby.
That becomes surprisingly powerful once YouTube stops being merely “YouTube videos.”
If a television series is officially available there, I don’t have to remember which media conglomerate owns it this quarter. I search for it.
If I want a game presentation, I search for it.
If I want to know why a Superman game is apparently so difficult to make, I search for it.
If I want to know whether an apple provides more energy than coffee, I search for it, despite having survived for 37 years without requiring a ruling.
And if I don’t know what I want, YouTube is prepared to generate a need. Before reviewing my watch history, I had forgotten that I apparently needed to see whether two interleaved phone books could be pulled apart, why cold drinks were deadly before 1914, every occasion on which evolution produced a crab, and what ancient humans did when it was too hot to sleep.
The app collapses the distinction between watching television and looking something up about television, then collapses the distinction between looking something up and being ambushed by a new subject entirely.
Netflix wants you to stay inside Netflix.
YouTube wants you to fall down a staircase.
it has the world’s strangest back catalog
Streaming services present their catalogs as intentional collections.
Here are our prestige dramas.
Here are our comedies.
Here are our blockbuster movies.
Here is a tasteful row called “Because You Watched The White Lotus.”
YouTube’s catalog feels archaeological.
There are current game presentations beside retrospectives about the Wii U and PlayStation Vita. There are polished cooking productions beside Modified Grilled Cheese — You Suck at Cooking. There’s a 100-hour Counter-Strike 2 marathon somewhere between Cobblemon analysis and an episode of Poker Face in which one dish has been sabotaged.
I watched a history of browser games, a video about weird 3D GIFs, and somebody playing Toontown Rewritten. On another service, that would require a carefully programmed nostalgia collection. On YouTube, it’s apparently just Tuesday.
There are also entire ecosystems of old media being watched, clipped, reconsidered, ranked, and turned into new media. A chaotic episode of Wheel of Fortune becomes a full upload. Old celebrity interviews become warning signs. Every bad wrestling faction can be assembled into a taxonomy. A forgotten console receives the sort of historical treatment once reserved for dead monarchs.
A streaming service would never design a catalog this way.
That is precisely why I like it.
For years, online video has moved toward behaving more like television: better production, professional creators, cleaner interfaces, premium subscriptions, and increasingly expensive programming.
YouTube accomplished all of that without successfully removing the basement underneath it.
The polished television is sitting directly on top of twenty years of internet debris.
That rules.
the streaming services are becoming tenants
The funniest part is that conventional streaming companies seem increasingly willing to simply move into YouTube.
YouTube launched Primetime Channels so people could subscribe to individual services and watch their shows, movies, and live programming without leaving YouTube. FOX One joined in June 2026, and Peacock followed later that month. YouTube described the point plainly: put more entertainment in one place so viewers do not have to jump between apps. (YouTube Blog)
We spent years unbundling cable so every media company could build its own streaming service.
Now the streaming services are slowly climbing back into bundles.
Except one of the new cable companies is YouTube, and its channel guide was assembled by an algorithm with access to my psychological vulnerabilities.
Imagine explaining my recent programming schedule to somebody in 1998:
8:00 — Task Mistress 8:45 — The Worst WWF/WWE Factions 10:00 — Bob the Drag Queen runs a Roblox animal hospital while armed 10:32 — festive cheese 11:10 — can air become alcohol? 11:28 — an update on some rocks a woman left at stage one for six months 11:47 — ancient heat-management strategies 12:09 — typewriter keyboards 12:31 — illegal pink pineapples
That channel would immediately become my favorite channel.
maybe this is what streaming should have been
I don’t particularly want another perfectly curated streaming service.
We have those.
They’re fine.
What I increasingly appreciate is a place where professional entertainment and random human obsession occupy the same space.
My history is full of videos made by broadcasters, newspapers, game companies, established production studios, independent creators, comedians, drag queens, wrestling obsessives, hardware tinkerers, and people who have appointed themselves historians of failed consoles. YouTube doesn’t ask me to decide which class of media I am currently consuming. It just keeps playing.
That used to be much more common online. The internet did not have such clean boundaries between “media” and “some thing a guy made.” YouTube still doesn’t.
It may now contain television networks, subscription services, live sports, studio movies, premium entertainment, and shows I already wanted to rewatch, but none of those things have managed to displace the weird website underneath.
They just moved in next door to it.
So now YouTube is possibly the most complete streaming service, provided your definition of complete includes Please Like Me, professional Japanese kitchen gadgets, WWE nobodies who somehow became world champion, Michael Jackson’s most savage moments, an LGBTQ+ sandwich, and a Pokémon toy that is also a Nintendo DS.
Mine apparently does.
Anyway, I need to get back to Please Like Me.
Unless YouTube would like to explain why everything keeps evolving into crabs first.
In which case all bets are off.