In his annual letter about the state of YouTube, CEO Neal Mohan shared that YouTube TV has passed 8 million subscribers in seven years. Mohan also revealed that YouTube viewers watch a daily average of 1 billion hours of the 19-year-old streaming video platform on a TV screen. With more than 3 million channels in the YouTube Partner Program, the platform has in the past three years paid over $70 billion to creators, artists and media companies. Now, as YouTube integrates AI, Mohan envisions developing “entirely new ways of empowering creative expression, managing rights, and driving revenue.”

“AI should empower human creativity, not replace it, and everyone should have access to AI tools that will push the boundaries of creative expression,” Mohan explained in the blog post, vowing the Google-owned video streaming service will help everyone harness the capabilities of AI, which YouTube rolled out in tools like Dream Screen, to generate images and backgrounds for YouTube Shorts and mobile video, and the platform’s Music AI Incubator.

Mohan also talked up the Android mobile app YouTube Create, which “can be used to make Shorts or longer videos, allowing creators to edit, soundtrack, add captions and more,” free from phones. Launched late last year in select markets, it is now available globally in beta.

The creative pursuits are icing on the cake, according to Deadline, which says the first subscriber figures provided for YouTube TV since 2022 (when it passed the 5 million mark) has it commercially outshining the competition even as it captures the imagination of users.

“While rival Internet-delivered services like Fubo and Hulu + Live TV have posted modest subscriber gains, YouTube TV is now in a much higher weight class and is adding share as Comcast, Charter and DirecTV continue to shrink,” Deadline writes. “YouTube TV has also benefited from last year’s start of NFL Sunday Ticket as an add-on option.”

YouTube TV “was said to be Google’s fastest-growing product last year,” reports 9to5Google, which says Mohan “hopes to offer ‘a best in class experience for subscriptions and YouTube in the living room’ in 2024.”

ReadWrite notes that YouTube has successfully ushered its content onto the main stage in the world’s living rooms, a trend that exploded concurrent with significant growth in the number of “creators who now receive the majority of their watchtime from the big screen,” up more than 400 percent in the last three years. In addition to the surge of YouTube TV viewers, roughly 100 million are now subscribing to YouTube Music and Premium.”