The Oscars will move to YouTube in 2029, leaving longtime home of ABC

In a TV shocker no one saw coming — doubtless ABC, too — the Oscars will move to YouTube in 2029.

Google-owned YouTube, the world's most-viewed video platform, secured exclusive rights to the world's most prestigious entertainment awards ceremony, by outbidding ABC, which has telecast the Academy Awards since 1976. According to trade reports, YouTube's first Oscars telecast will be the 101st ceremony. The deal will run through 2033.

"The Oscars are one of our essential cultural institutions, honoring excellence in storytelling and artistry. Partnering with the Academy to bring this celebration of art and entertainment to viewers all over the world will inspire a new generation of creativity and film lovers while staying true to the Oscars’ storied legacy," YouTube said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

First broadcast on live TV on March 19, 1953, on NBC, the Oscars moved to ABC in 1961. (NBC held the rights in the early 1970s.) The Oscars were not only a prestige vehicle for ABC, but also a huge ratings draw. The 70th Academy Awards in 1998, for example, drew just over 57 million viewers, and while viewership has trended lower (and lower), the prestige factor has not. A constellation of other televised events (including, of course, the red carpet) has also been part of ABC's long and profitable ties to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The Oscars' bond to TV has been both inextricable and organic — a self-sustaining, positive feedback loop that made the Awards seem bigger, and the network airing them bigger in return. Bob Hope, with deep ties to NBC owner RCA, hosted the Oscars a record 19 times. Johnny Carson was host in the early '80s and, more recently, Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O'Brien.

As a sui generis TV event, the Oscars supplied an endless stream of memes (Barbra Streisand's "Hello, gorgeous"), and "moments" (John Travolta's "Adele Dazeem"), and catastrophes (the wrong best picture; Will Smith's Slap Seen Around the World). And while it's long been fashionable, and often accurate, to decry the Oscars as a bloated narcissistic spectacle on steroids, nothing on TV — including the Super Bowl or Halftime Show — has generated as many memories permanently hard-wired from the second they were registered, for better or ill — David Letterman's "Uma/Oprah," or Chris Rock's "OscarsSoWhite" roast, or Rob Lowe and "Snow White."

All on TV — and soon, all on YouTube, the world's largest online video sharing platform (by far). That too will lead to inevitable questions. Will this specialness be leveled, or worse, flattened on YouTube, where the dumbest of videos can draw millions of likes, or where anybody can be a "star" (hardly, but still)?

The Oscars telecast — as a much-beloved, much-ridiculed, much-viewed relic of monoculture — was unique simply because it was a telecast, on a network that endlessly promoted it and turned it into the must-watch, must-be-there, must-have-popcorn-at-the-ready TV event.

The Oscars have been all this and so much more for the past 72 years, but starting in 2029, goodbye to all that.

ABC, meanwhile, did issue this stiff-upper-lip statement: "ABC has been the proud home to The Oscars for more than half a century. We look forward to the next three telecasts, including the show’s centennial celebration in 2028, and wish the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences continued success."