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BROAD-CAST

Americans watched YouTube more than any other platform on TVs in February

YouTube’s share of TV usage has increased 53% in the last two years, per Nielsen.

3/28/25 7:07AM

When it first landed on Apple devices, the YouTube app icon was a little, beige, vintage-looking cartoon TV. It stuck with that for years before eventually distancing itself from the older, more familiar medium, switching in its distinctive red play button — an icon that’s gently seared itself into the minds of billions.

Now, years on, YouTube seems to be taking over the medium it once mimicked.

Big(ger) screen

According to February data from Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge report, YouTube was the most-watched platform across US televisions, taking an 11.6% share of screen time and topping the distributor list for only the second time since Nielsen began tracking the data.

Put another way: Americans watched YouTube on their TVs more than anything else — more than Disney (and all of its entities), NBC, Paramount, Fox, Netflix. Everything.

YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006, having clinched the top spot again underscores the growing shift in how people are consuming content from the platform, with its CEO last month confirming that people are watching on their TVs more than their phones for the first time.

Apart from the two YouTube instances and a high jump from NBC during its Olympics coverage, which saw the company take a record 13.4% share of TV usage in August last year, the Walt Disney Company has been winning the war for American eyeballs, with channels like ESPN, ABC, and its streaming services all counting toward its overall share. Indeed, thanks mostly to the ESPN-aired College Football Playoffs, Disney made up 12% of TV usage in January — its highest monthly total so far.

While Nielsen has made only distributor figures from November 2023 onward public, it revealed that YouTube accounted for just 7.9% of American TV viewing time in February 2023, meaning the number of us who’ve been switching on our TV sets to tune in to the latest offerings from Mr Beast et al. has jumped 53% in just two years.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5