YouTube arrives at Edinburgh as a peer – on its own terms

British television has spent recent years deciding whether YouTube is a friend or foe. Last week it invited the platform to answer the question itself.

Pedro Pina, YouTube's vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, became the first YouTube executive to deliver the MacTaggart Lecture, the industry's most coveted and frequently agenda-setting address. Some in the industry had called it letting "the fox into the hen house." Pina's response, in effect, was that the fox had been living there for years.

"We are on the cusp of a third golden age of television," he told the room, likening the current upheaval to earlier periods of disruption that expanded the industry rather than shrinking it.

Much of his case pushed back on a narrative he said was taking hold, namely, that British television is under siege, and online video is to blame.

"It's a powerful story. It's an emotive story. The trouble is, it is not true."

His argument, borrowed from the arrival of photography in the 1830s, was that new forms clarify old ones rather than replace them. "Before anybody panics, don't worry – I'm not going to tell you that you all need to retrain as YouTubers," he said. "Focus on the things TV does best."

The proof is in the pudding

Pina didn't need to reach far for evidence. Amelia Dimoldenberg and Nella Rose have both moved from YouTube into primetime television over the past year, and he pointed to that traffic as proof the industry's old entry points no longer hold.

"You no longer need an agent, a commission, or even an industry contact to build a television audience," he said, calling it the democratisation of television. His conclusion was blunter: "YouTube is television."

The movement runs the other way too. As previously reported by The Daily Influence, the Sidemen have taken Inside from YouTube to Netflix and built a production company around it. The BBC is developing programming specifically for YouTube, and the National Film and Television School has partnered with both YouTube and Sidemen Entertainment on training that bridges broadcast and creator-led production. Pina backed the argument further with £3 million for UK training programmes.

Buying what he's selling?

Pina's partnership argument was most concrete when he turned to the BBC. The corporation runs no advertising on most of its UK-facing YouTube content, and YouTube takes no cut either, instead sending "more than half of the advertising revenue straight back," when it does monetise, he said. BBC News now streams around the clock on the platform in Australia, Poland, Nigeria and Kenya.

"Partnerships like this really are the way forward for UK television," he said.

But Pina did also indicate there were limits to the partnership he was describing.

He used part of the lecture to argue against giving public service broadcasters guaranteed prominence on video-sharing platforms under the government's "Watch This Space" green paper, warning it "could put future partnerships in jeopardy" and threaten the livelihoods of independent creators and production companies.

The proposals have already garnered pushback from elsewhere in the creator sector, with Influencer Marketing Trade Body director general Scott Guthrie warning in July that the measures could leave creator content looking less trustworthy than broadcast news by default.

Consultation on those proposals closed on Monday. The industry now waits to find out whether the government was listening to the same argument Edinburgh just heard.