As the relationship between sports leagues and streaming platforms has grown from one-off experiments to multi-year media rights packages, nearly all of the major streamers have taken a swing at live sports broadcasting. But the biggest streamer of them all has been on the sidelines until Friday night. Is YouTube the sleeping giant that will upend the sports streaming landscape? Ben Huddleston takes a look.

On Friday, the fifth different streaming platform in six years will carry an exclusive NFL game. The league’s International Series game from Brazil, which aired exclusively on Peacock last season, will air exclusively on YouTube. While the matchup of the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers will be available on local NBC affiliates in the home markets, and on TSN and CTV in Canada, it will be only available to watch free on YouTube in the rest of the country and around the world.

For YouTube, the timing of the game is not coincidental. With two days to go before the first Sunday of the regular season, the Google-owned platform will put its “Sunday Ticket” product front and center, along with offering YouTube TV as an easy way to watch the rest of the NFL season.

As far as the game broadcast, YouTube is planning a relatively traditional presentation. NBC Sports will produce the game for YouTube, with familiar NFL Network personalities Rich Eisen and Kurt Warner on the call. But the biggest question sports media observers have surrounds the viewership for the platform’s NFL debut.

Before further analysis is presented, a word of caution about audience measurement on YouTube. The platform displays a view count next to every video, which represents the number of users worldwide that viewed at least 30 seconds of the video. Despite online claims to the contrary, YouTube-measured viewership is not analogous to US Nielsen-measured linear television viewership. YouTube’s measurement is perhaps more akin to the “total reach” metric released for certain events on US television, which counts the number of US viewers present for at least one minute of a telecast. By this metric, the FOX broadcast of Super Bowl LIX in February had a total reach of 191.1 million, compared to an average minute audience of 127.7 million.

For an official audience measurement, YouTube has partnered with Nielsen to create a “custom methodology” which as not been approved by the Media Rating Council, according to ESPN SVP Flora Kelly, who warned that YouTube’s NFL audience statistic will not be a fair comparison to the league’s other broadcasters.

An exclusive NFL game will be a highlight for an already dominant YouTube, whose strength is derived from its seemingly infinite amount of content. The company revealed in 2019 that more than 500 hours of content are added to YouTube every minute, a figure that has surely grown since. By creating a platform that is easy for users and creators to access, YouTube’s strength is in managing huge amounts of content. The company does not have to negotiate licensing agreements with every show that appears; anyone can create a YouTube account and begin producing their own television for a handful of viewers or audiences of millions.

The tremendous content library resulted in YouTube reporting advertising revenue of $36.1 billion in 2024, compared to $10.3 billion for Paramount, $10.0 billion for Comcast, and $5.4 billion for Fox. YouTube’s content acquisition strategy is unique in that, aside from a small number of high-profile content agreements with flat rights fees, it shares a portion of advertising revenue with qualifying creators after that revenue has been recognized, ensuring that the platform almost never loses money. There are millions of creators looking for an audience giving the platform free content, and YouTube only has to pay them if they generate revenue.

This reliance on user-generated content does not come without its own issues, however. The platform is frequently embroiled in controversies around inappropriate content and has to delicately maintain a content moderation policy to ensure the platform remains agreeable for advertisers. Copyright infringement is also common, but the site maintains a robust AI-powered content identification program to return revenue to rightsholders whose content has been shared without authorization.

These issues may have contributed to the platform being overlooked in serious conversations around sports rights, but the numbers have made it hard to resist. According to Nielsen’s analysis of July 2025 viewership, more than 1 in 8 minutes (13.4%) of all television in the US was consumed via YouTube. That number has been increasing steadily, and is growing closer to the total share of broadcast television viewing (18.4%). That exact comparison may be skewed by the summer time frame — the same comparison in November 2024, the heart of football season, shows a 10.8% share for YouTube and 23.7% for broadcast TV.

While this game will certainly generate headlines for the streamer, this is far from the first sporting event to air on the platform: Major League Baseball previously licensed weekly afternoon games to YouTube from 2019-2022. But beyond the major leagues, YouTube is the primary outlet for several mid-major college conferences, niche leagues, youth sports, international events, and more. YouTube’s easy-to-use livestreaming tools allow anyone to broadcast a game from their phone in the stands. Beyond live game inventory, US leagues and media companies have found YouTube to be a valuable repository for their content. The audience for “The Pat McAfee Show” was on YouTube long before it was on ESPN, and the show’s YouTube broadcast still shows six-figure viewership marks regularly. Within hours of completion, league-produced highlights and recaps for games from the NFL, MLB, NBA, etc. are available on YouTube and widely consumed. Podcast content is also popular: a recent episode from Chiefs TE Travis Kelce has since garnered 22 million views, and there’s reason to suspect he and his podcast guest may draw additional viewers to Friday’s game.

Does a successful game broadcast mean that YouTube is a future home of live sports? The leagues would certainly hope so, as high-margin tech companies may be the only way to maintain their sky-high rights fees as traditional media continues its decline. But for now, for the reasons demonstrated above, YouTube does not need to secure large quantities of sports rights. The purpose of this NFL broadcast is two-fold: to sell Sunday Ticket subscriptions, and to generate positive PR about the platform’s reach.

The strategy is in line with that of Netflix, which has been selective about its sports rights in favoring high-profile, marquee events (NFL on Christmas, MLB’s Home Run Derby) over full-season coverage. YouTube seems to be also pursuing this strategy outside of sports, as reporting last month indicated the streamer is interested in swiping the Academy Awards telecast from its longtime ABC home, further legitimizing YouTube as the dominant video provider in the US.

For fans, the free, universal access to Friday’s game will be among the easiest of the new streamers to stomach, especially for only one night. But as the NFL re-evaluates its media rights ahead of the 2029 season, it may be just the beginning of streaming becoming an even bigger part of a football fan’s life.