Piers Morgan has announced he is taking his daily talk show, Uncensored, off TalkTV to focus on its YouTube channel.

The presenter said TV schedules had become an “unnecessary straitjacket” and that moving online would allow him to conduct longer, in-depth interviews and attract a more global audience.

The show’s YouTube channel currently has 2.3 million subscribers, many times the estimated daily TV audience on TalkTV. It is understood that some of his interviews will be shown on TalkTV.

TalkTV was launched by News UK, a subsidiary of the Murdoch family’s News Corp, in April 2022 with Morgan one of the key anchors in the promotion of the channel.

Speaking to The Times, Morgan said: “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.”

“People are watching the content on YouTube rather than conventional television and I have no problem with that. You can’t defy audiences or tell them how they should be consuming. I could happily interview Elon Musk for three or four hours tomorrow and the audience would lap it up. But the nightly restriction of having to go into a studio at 8pm when sometimes there is nothing happening and literally fill time? Nobody wants that. The question becomes, why do it?,” he added.