Older viewers are emerging as YouTube’s quiet power base for long-form film and TV, according to new data from Ampere Analysis.
Based on a 56,000-respondent global tracker, Ampere says 85% of internet users now watch YouTube each month, with 18% of users reporting that they watch full-length movies and TV shows on the platform. The strongest engagement with this long-form catalogue sits among 35-64-year-olds, challenging perceptions of YouTube as a youth-only, short-form brand.
Households with children are a key to the shift, with parents and grandparents using YouTube on the main screen for multi-generational viewing. Ampere describes these long-form viewers as “content super-consumers”, engaging with more genres than the average internet user and offering rights holders deeper reach into older and higher-spending demos that may be under-served by traditional pay TV and local SVOD.
Take-up of full-length viewing on YouTube varies sharply across the 29 surveyed markets: 32% of internet users in India report watching films and series on YouTube, compared to 20% in Saudi Arabia, 15% in the US and 12% in the UK, falling to 7% in Sweden. Ampere links higher adoption to markets with fewer on-demand options and weaker broadcaster BVOD offerings, highlighting Brazil and Mexico as particularly attractive for catalogue monetisation and branded channels, helped by strong YouTube consumption on smart TVs.
For content owners, the findings underline YouTube’s role as both competitor and complement to AVOD, FAST and SVOD. Older-skewing long-form audiences on connected TVs position the platform as a mainstream distribution window for studio libraries, independent catalogues and broadcaster archive, but also raise fresh questions over windowing discipline and the risk of training legacy pay and FTA viewers to go direct to YouTube.
Ampere’s Ed Ludlow cautions that success on the platform depends on sharper targeting: the same scale that makes YouTube attractive also masks major demographic and market-level differences in behaviour. For broadcasters and rights holders weighing YouTube as a FAST/AVOD outlet, the message is clear: understand who you are really reaching – and which of your traditional services they may be watching less as a result.
