You know that the cable TV industry is in steep decline.
You know it because of all the evidence around you. And you know it because we tell you about it over and over.
Still, sometimes you see a stat that helps put it all into even sharper perspective. Like this:
Fifteen years ago, nearly 9 in 10 US households had a pay TV subscription. By the end of 2025, that number will be down to five out of 10.
That estimate comes from Madison and Wall, the technology/media advisory firm. CEO Brian Wieser also helpfully shows what those stats — which include traditional pay TV providers like Comcast, and digital ones like YouTubeTV — look like in chart form:
Madison and Wall
(That 50.2% number is for Q3 of this year; Wieser thinks that should get down to 50% or lower by the end of December.)
Again, this is not news for people who invest in or operate media companies. It explains, for instance, why everyone from Comcast to Warner Bros. Discovery to A&E is trying to sell, spin off, or otherwise ditch most of their cable TV assets. (Larry and David Ellison’s Paramount, meanwhile, insists that it won’t spin off its cable channels, even while it acknowledges that “each quarter is accelerating decline.”)
It also has implications for advertisers, who stuck with TV for a long time, even when it became clear it was in decline, because that was a tried-and-true way of reaching a lot of people. No longer.
“Linear TV can still deliver high levels of reach and retains an outsized share of inventory, but higher levels of audience reach can be found elsewhere,” the Madison and Wall report published Tuesday notes. “As consumers migrate to streaming, endemic digital video, and even social video, those environments increasingly deliver similar awareness outcomes.”
As many TV executives, employees, and investors note, pay TV isn’t shutting down tomorrow — the business still makes money, even as it shrinks. Which reminds me a bit of my AOL’s dial-up internet business, which stuck around for many years after just about everyone had moved on to broadband.
AOL finally shut it down in September.
