How serious is Google really about its TV future?
Opinion
As YouTube blurs the line between platform and broadcaster, Google’s real priority becomes easier to spot.
Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor, knows a lot about monopolies. In fact, he’s famous for pontificating on why “competition is for losers”.
In his 2014 book Zero to One, Thiel observes that monopolies rarely describe themselves as they really are. Instead, they expand the frame around their business to make dominance harder to see.
As Thiel puts it: “[B]ragging about their great monopoly invites being audited, scrutinised, and attacked…. they tend to do whatever they can to conceal their monopoly—usually by exaggerating the power of their (nonexistent) competition.”
More than a decade on, Alphabet (Google) is no longer just a search engine. It is an AI company. A cloud provider. A mobility pioneer. And, as last year brought into focus, a connected-TV platform (YouTube). The labels have multiplied, but the underlying logic remains the same.
Which raises a simple question: if Alphabet really is as diversified as it claims, why does regulation remain the single biggest risk it flags in its own public filings?
What Alphabet actually worries about
Confused? Good. That’s useful.
But look at Alphabet’s own public filings, and a simpler picture emerges. When speaking to its own investors and not the breathless world of business media, Alphabet is actually quite explicit about what it considers existential. Not technological disruption. Not a better product elsewhere. Not even AI is failing to deliver returns.
The dominant risk it flags repeatedly is regulation: antitrust action, remedies, and forced changes to products, distribution, or structure. This category of risk is treated differently from competitive or operational challenges.
Its dominance in search advertising implies pricing power and creates a prohibitive moat for challengers. That position is well understood, legally contested, and already under pressure, as we’ve seen in recent major court cases in the US.
What is far less acknowledged — and therefore more strategically sensitive — is the position it occupies in video advertising through YouTube.
YouTube has become the default global video layer of the internet. For advertisers, it increasingly functions as an unavoidable route to video attention at scale. For Alphabet, that creates a second monopoly-like exposure just as regulators are becoming more willing to intervene in the first.
Seen through that lens, Alphabet’s recent behaviour starts to make sense.
Re-reading the “YouTube is the new TV” moment
As I and many others have written about over the past year, YouTube has leaned hard into a “new TV” narrative: living-room screens, long-form viewing, sports rights, subscription products. The messaging is designed to place YouTube in the same mental category as broadcasters and connected-TV platforms.
On the surface, this looks like a growth play — a bid for TV budgets. I wrote last summer that this was problematic because Alphabet was yet to “decide where YouTube stands” on whether it is a digital TV channel or a social-media platform. While I maintain that it can’t be both, I now see that the way I framed this was wrong.
Because this confusion is not problematic at all. In fact, it’s a great problem solver.
By positioning YouTube as a challenger in the television market, Alphabet does two things at once. First, it puts pressure on marketers and agencies to justify spending on broadcast and CTV relative to YouTube.
Second — and more importantly — it reframes YouTube away from being understood as an extension of Google’s existing dominance in demand capture.
So the industry keeps arguing about the wrong question.
Not “is YouTube TV?”, but: is YouTube primarily a television competitor, or is it a video search engine with unprecedented scale?
Alphabet would much rather we debate the former.
Behavioural inconsistency is the tell
If YouTube were genuinely trying to become a conventional TV company, its behaviour would be predictable. It would fully comply with industry measurement standards. It would accept comparability. It would behave like a media owner first and a platform second.
Instead, we see selective engagement.
At times, YouTube appears conciliatory and traditional: bidding for sports rights, engaging in carriage-style disputes, borrowing the language of legacy television. At other times, it resists the very institutions that would cement that identity, preferring bespoke measurement and partial alignment.
Viewed narrowly, this looks inconsistent. Viewed through the lens of regulatory risk management, it is entirely coherent.
YouTube needs to look enough like TV to muddy market definitions — but not so much like TV that it inherits the regulatory obligations and scrutiny that come with being treated as one.
For outsiders, it’s confusing. For them, it’s calibration.
What Alphabet will not do
One of the most reliable ways to understand future behaviour is to look at what a company refuses to do.
Such as: Alphabet has never seriously attempted to acquire a major TV or streaming ‘rival’. CEO Sundar Pichai claimed in an interview last year that there was a serious debate over whether to buy Netflix a decade ago, but that’s a world away from actually making a bid.
Such a move would instantly clarify intent and signal a willingness to operate under the constraints of television economics and regulation.
Instead, it signals that Alphabet is willing to orbit television. But not willing to be bound by it.
The same pattern appears elsewhere — self-driving cars, gaming, and hardware. Each has been loudly explored, selectively funded, and quietly deprioritised when it failed to serve the core objective: insulating monopoly positions rather than replacing them.
AI may now be the interesting exception, as it genuinely threatens to disrupt Google’s own demand-capture model. The way Google has integrated “AI Overviews” and conversational interfaces points towards a ‘zero-click’ future in which traditional search may decline.
Where this leaves us
Don’t get me wrong; more adspend flowing to YouTube may reflect performance rather than advertisers being suckered by a distraction game.
But it may also reflect the gravitational pull of a platform that already controls demand capture elsewhere. Treating YouTube as “just another TV channel” avoids confronting that tension.
Because it suits Alphabet for advertisers, agencies and media owners to keep arguing about categories: TV versus digital; platform versus publisher. Apples versus oranges.
What it does not want us asking is whether the market’s structure — and the concentration of power within it — is shaping spend patterns and narrowing choice.
That question is harder. But it’s the one that really points to the future.
Omar Oakes was the founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years.