2025 trend: Streamers and YouTube will take pages from each other’s playbooks

YouTube’s growing prominence on connected TV (CTV) will drive this shift. In 2024, YouTube’s US CTV audience surpassed Amazon Prime Video’s total US audience, per our forecast. In 2025, 68.8% of YouTube’s 248.6 million monthly viewers will watch on CTVs, which means its CTV audience will be just 19.0 million smaller than Netflix’s total audience across devices. That will put it in direct competition with more premium streaming services for CTV ad dollars.

Streamers will become more social. YouTube’s popularity is largely due to its wide library of creator and influencer content and the ability for viewers to engage socially with those videos. That will expand in 2025 in at least two ways.

1. More creator content: Netflix already has a history of licensing made-for-YouTube content, mostly in children’s entertainment. As the studio content production slowdown continues into 2025, original content from popular creators can also provide a cheaper, audience-tested way for streamers to fill in any gaps.
2. More social-like features: Netflix’s “Moments” is the latest social-like feature from a streaming platform, allowing users to share short clips from TV shows or movies on other platforms, including social.

YouTube will become more Netflix-esque. Content discovery is a major point for YouTube creators and viewers, particularly as some videos have become more episodic and TV-like. In 2025, the platform will continue its efforts to make its CTV app more “premium,” following recent updates that allow creators to organize their videos into episodes and seasons, for example. YouTube could also revisit original programming as more creators start to license their content to other platforms. But that will depend on how some of next year’s big bets, including MrBeast’s “Beast Games” on Amazon Prime, fare among audiences.

Read the full report, Top Trends to Watch in 2025.