Pokémon TV Has Become A YouTube Channel
It starts uploading on December 6, but the channel was created in September, thus the tense choices
The streaming destiny for the Pokémon anime, at least to American audiences, is bigger than we thought. Less than a year after the closure of the Pokémon TV app, it turns out the brand will live on as a YouTube channel, with videos starting Friday, December 6.
Created on September 16, the channel description reads “Welcome to the official Pokémon TV YouTube channel, where you can explore the world of Pokémon with Ash & Pikachu! Experience some of the most iconic moments from their adventure…” Uploads will be a healthy mix of full episodes, livestreams, compilations, and more. It’s probably worth noting that as of writing, notifications are togglable, meaning the channel as a whole has not yet been marked for kids. Currently, the main Pokémon YouTube channel has every generational premiere: “Pokémon—I Choose You!”, “Don’t Touch That ‘dile”, “Get the Show on the Road”, “Following a Maiden’s Voyage”, “In the Shadow of Zekrom!”, “Kalos, Where Dreams and Adventures Begin!”, “Alola to New Adventure!”, “Enter Pikachu!” and both parts of “The Pendant That Starts It All”, but no full episodes beyond that. Plenty of clips though.
The original Pokémon TV began on the franchise’s website in 2010, expanding to mobile app form in 2013, becoming available through the Apple App Store, Google Play, Roku, Amazon Appstore, and Nintendo Switch, though the latter took until 2021. The app closure was announced on January 8 for March 28, though it seems in reality it took until March 31 for functionality to actually break. For some reason it took several more months for it to happen to me. At sunsetting time, the main anime episodes the app had were all 112 episodes of the first two seasons in circulation covering Kanto and the Orange Islands, which since 2013 have been branded “The Beginning”, The Sun and Moon series, which encompass a same-titled season, and subsequent seasons with subtitles Ultra Adventures and Ultra Legends, and the first two seasons of the otherwise Netflix-exclusive in the States Journeys series, Journeys and Master Journeys, and the first dozen episodes of Ultimate Journeys. The closure did complicate an already splintered Pokémon streaming experience, which aside from the major streamers, includes three hour streams on Twitch every Tuesday and Thursday at 5 PM Eastern. Whether this will start overlapping with the YouTube livestreams is unknown. Set playlists? Always on? Both? Plenty of possibilities!
Things began looking up in August, when the franchise teamed up with WildBrain to launch a FAST channel, first landing on Pluto TV in October. Promised to contain the 22 seasons and 1,000+ episodes in circulation from the original series to the Sun & Moon series, it began with the first four seasons before adding the fifth, Master Quest, allowing the completion of Ash and Pikachu’s travels through the Johto region. As of writing it’s back around “Battle of the Badge” so it would take too long to find out if it’s grown even more. It will certainly be intriguing to monitor the behaviors of Pokémon TV going forward.
