Google CEO: Viewers Accrue 100 Million Hours Of Daily YouTube Watch Time From Their Living Rooms

For those of us who cover online video, the quarterly earnings calls of Google parent company Alphabet tend not to be too exciting. Alphabet’s execs rarely offer financial specifics for Google-owned video site YouTube, and the calls end up as quarterly reassurances of Google’s eminence within the tech world.

Instead of offering revenue figures for YouTube, Alphabet tends to offer up some bits of information related to the platform’s growth. In the company’s latest earnings call, which covered the third quarter of 2017, Google CEO Sundar Pichai (pictured above) noted that YouTube is growing substantially on TV screens. He said that the video site’s viewership within living rooms is up to 100 million hours per day, which represents a 70% increase over the previous year.

That piece of data is good news for YouTube given the degree to which it has peddled TV-style consumption over the past year. The shows on its YouTube Red platform are designed to be binged, just like Netflix and Amazon shows. Meanwhile, it has begun a heavy advertising campaign for its cable competitor YouTube TV, which is the presenting sponsor of the 2017 World Series. Perhaps these developments will push YouTube’s living room watch time even higher, though the video site already represents a compelling competitor for the television industry.