Piers Morgan is taking his daily Uncensored show off TalkTV to focus on its YouTube channel.
The broadcaster said television schedules had become an “unnecessary straitjacket” and that moving online would allow him to conduct longer, more in-depth interviews. He also said it would enable him to attract a more global audience.
The show's YouTube channel currently has 2.35 million subscribers, many times its estimated daily TV audience. The announcement comes less than two years after the launch of TalkTV by News UK, a subsidiary of the Murdoch family's News Corp.
The channel was one of a number set up to offer alternatives to the news coverage of the more established broadcasters. Speaking to the Times, Morgan said greater numbers of people were watching his show on Youtube and that “you can't defy audiences or tell them how they should be consuming”.
“It's clear there's a huge global demand for the content we're making, but the commitment to a daily show at a fixed schedule, with all the editing and time sensitivities that involves, has been an increasingly unnecessary straitjacket,” he said.
He gave as an example an interview published on Monday afternoon with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak which made headlines after Mr Sunak agreed to a £1,000 bet over his Rwanda policy.
“Had we waited until 8pm to air it first on TalkTV, it would have been overtaken by the huge breaking news of King Charles's cancer diagnosis,” he said.
Morgan also told US outlet Semafor that he often wished he could let an interview run for hours because “that's what the YouTube crowd love”. He said he co-owns Uncensored with News Corp and that “I don't see any reason why I couldn't expand the Uncensored brand globally.”
Some of the most watched news and interview shows in the world are now on YouTube, with many of them built around an individual host or group of presenters. A channel hosted by conservative US political pundit Ben Shapiro has 6.7 million subscribers, while the left-leaning Young Turks news channel has 5.8 million.
— CutC by bbc.com
