As the TV business America knew for decades began to crumble, YouTube saw an opportunity. People remained interested in linear content, company leadership believed, but its format needed updating.
In the second quarter of 2015, pay-TV services lost more than 600,000 subscribers, according to one research firm. Entertainment stock slumps that August cost investors $60 billion over a single two-day span. Streamers, led by Netflix, were on the rise; the cable bundle’s days appeared numbered.
Around that time, YouTube’s then-CEO Susan Wojcicki pitched Christian Oestlien, a product manager who had left the company two years earlier to join Twitter, on a return. “What if you came back here,” Wojcicki said, “and helped me figure out what to do with TV?”
One of Oestlien’s last conversations before taking on the task was with recently departed YouTube product leader Shishir Mehrotra. “He said, ‘That’s probably the most difficult job you could take,’” Oestlien recalled.
Content owners would be unlikely to play nice with the rising tech power. People were used to watching YouTube content for free, and whether they’d pay for videos was an open question. YouTube and its parent company Google had tried various TV-related strategies over the last decade, often without lasting success.
