YouTube Is Swallowing TV Whole, and It’s Coming for the Sitcom

For two decades, YouTube has tried to convince advertisers that it’s the future of entertainment. The pitch has always been simple enough: “Young people don’t watch cable; they watch YouTube.” It doesn’t exactly require a PowerPoint presentation. But YouTube has had problems making its case. The first is that the vast majority of videos on the site aren’t filmed to Scorsese-like standards. “The biggest knock against creator content is that it’s low quality, s---, crap, slop, garbage,” Doug Shapiro , a former executive at Time Warner, wrote in December. That’s...