Why YouTube Decided to Take Over Cable Television

It might be the bleakest chart in the media business: the severe loss of subscribers in recent years among cable and satellite companies, which for decades were the primary way people subscribed to old-fashioned television channels such as CBS and ESPN.

Amid the gloom, though, one company has stood out: YouTube TV, which has grown from zero subscribers in 2017 to 8 million in February this year, making it the third biggest provider of traditional subscription TV in the U.S. after Charter and Comcast.

Almost nothing about the rise of YouTube TV makes sense on the surface. The service is a subsidiary of Google’s YouTube, the all-powerful streaming service that has contributed in no small measure to the cord cutting afflicting cable television. And YouTube didn’t launch YouTube TV to make money from it directly—after all, profits are hard to come by even for cable and satellite operators, thanks to high programming costs.