Goodbye 11.35pm: Why linear tv's biggest names are all fleeing to YouTube

A belief formed that evening news began at exactly 9.00pm and that the entire country followed the same broadcast rhythm. That national timing has since ended, and the people who originally set the schedule are now involved in burying it. Network television has been disrupted by corporate changes and legal pressures, yet hosts move quickly to public-access and online platforms. Stephen Colbert appeared on Monroe Community Media and then on a new YouTube channel, drawing large audiences without traditional late-night scheduling or commercial breaks. Piers Morgan also left a major media arrangement, criticizing the constraints of a fixed slot while building a large YouTube following and securing ownership of his brand.

"There was a moment, somewhere around 1990, when I sincerely believed that the most important thing my mother did each evening was sit down at 9.00pm sharp to watch the news. Not 9.01pm. Not 8.59pm. Nine, on the dot, because that was when the news began, because Sir Alastair Burnet had decided it was so, and because the rest of the United Kingdom, including, by the look of it, the entire cabinet, appeared to be doing exactly the same thing."

"That rhythm is now thoroughly, demonstrably, embarrassingly dead. And the people doing the burying are not bedroom-bound teenagers in TikTok-stained pyjamas. They are the very figures who built the broadcast schedule in the first place."

"Forty-eight hours after CBS finally smothered The Late Show with a corporate pillow, the network insists this had nothing to do with the lawsuit, the Skydance merger or the present occupant of the Oval Office, and we are of course expected to accept that assertion at the value of a Liz Truss lettuce, Colbert popped up on a public-access channel called Monroe Community Media. Then he popped up, rather more pointedly, on his shiny new YouTube channel, with Eminem and Jeff Daniels in tow, gathering 120,000 subscribers in a single weekend."

"No 11.35pm slot. No commercial break. No procession of Affiliate Sales stations of the cross. Just Stephen, a camera, and the most generous tip jar in the history of broadcasting. A few months earlier, Piers Morgan walked off the Murdoch reservation entirely, to which I would normally raise a single languid eyebrow, but the man left a reported £50 million on the table to do it."

Read at Business Matters