The Streaming Takeover: Industry Experts Warn That Broadcast and Cable TV May Soon Go Extinct

The erosion of the traditional TV landscape began many years ago. First, premium cable channels like HBO began to chip away …

The post The Streaming Takeover: Industry Experts Warn That Broadcast and Cable TV May Soon Go Extinct appeared first on TV Fanatic.

The erosion of the traditional TV landscape began many years ago.

First, premium cable channels like HBO began to chip away at the stronghold that had once been the exclusive domain of the “big three” networks.

Then, with the floodgates opened, a deluge of basic cable options — from MTV to ESPN — further flooded the market.

The rise of home video amounted to another assault on the broadcast fortress.

And not long after digital antennae dealt a death blow to rabbit ears a new and formidable threat emerged from the strange new frontier of the internet.

We’re talking, of course, about streaming.

A Growing Threat

For decades, the disintegration of network television was as gradual as climate change.

But over the course of the past 15 years, it’s gained the speed and momentum of a biblical flash flood.

It started, of course, with Netflix — a little startup that began by mailing DVDs to customers who indicated their preferences through the company’s website.

(If you ever want to feel truly ancient, try to convince a younger relative that you used to receive Netflix through the mail.)

In time, the site where subscribers ordered their DVDs began to offer digital content.

At first, this was almost an afterthought — something to watch while you wait for your next disk in the mail.

In its earliest days, the streaming site featured just 1,000 movies, a scant offering compared to the 70,000 DVDs customers could order by mail.

Little did we know that this new business model would quickly change the world.

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A New Challenger Emerges

In 2011, Netflix dipped its toes into the waters of original programming with the political thriller House of Cards.

Lilyhammer and Orange Is the New Black followed shortly thereafter and amounted to the first shots fired in what would later be known as the streaming wars.

In 2012, Hulu entered the fray with its first scripted series, Battleground.

Before the decade was out, the number of streaming services available to Americans would balloon from two to more than 90.

That rapid expansion has continued apace, with Forbes reporting in January that the number has reached 200.

And many of those services are shelling out big bucks for top talent and oodles of original programming — a business model that would have been unfathomable for a web-based media brand just a few years earlier.

Now, we’re on the brink of another development that once seemed impossible:

The TV giants of yesteryear are facing extinction as their hunting ground has been taken over by hundreds of smaller challengers.

The Beginning of the End

In 2022, Disney CEO Bob Iger recently warned that “linear TV and satellite is marching towards a great precipice, and it will be pushed off … I can’t tell you when, but it goes away.”

Now, the crash he predicted seems to be unfolding before our eyes.

Earlier this month, Warner Bros. endured a $9 billion impairment charge related to the performance of its linear cable networks, the latest in a string of humiliations for CEO David Zaslav.

“The cable networks just are in this horrific, perennial, never-ending decline,” Bank of America securities expert Jessica Reif Ehrlich recently told The Hollywood Reporter.

“It’s been more abysmal, I think, than almost anybody expected, even just two years ago, when the handwriting was on the wall, we still thought it would be at a slower pace than it’s actually been.”

Cable execs anticipated the mini-apocalypse that would come with the increased popularity of cord-cutting.

But apparently, the top dogs believed they would be able to weather that storm, in part by adopting an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” strategy.

What many didn’t see coming was the rise of ad-supported streaming services.

Now, the network and cable bigwigs are forced to contend with a “double whammy” situation:

They’re losing both viewers and advertisers to streaming services.

And with those two holes in the boat, it seems unlikely that the good ship linear TV will be able to remain afloat for much longer.

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The THR piece warns that cable channels might soon go the way of newspapers:

They’ll become targets for opportunistic investment funds until they simply go out of business entirely.

Broadcast networks might be able to ride out the storm simply because they’re free and they’ve had an much easier time finding a home in the streaming world thanks to services like Hulu Live.

Oh, and millions of Americans watch them out of habit, something that cannot be said of the million niche basic cable channels that popped over the past 20 years.

But even your classic ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox probably won’t survive in their current forms.

They’ll begin to look more and more like streaming services, favoring shorter seasons, longer hiatuses, and a more cancel-happy approach to programming.

In short, it’s a bad time to be an aspiring showrunner — or simply a fan of quality television.

It wasn’t all that long ago that it looked as though prestige TV had saved the day and elevated television from a media platform to a true art form.

But that era was short-lived, and today’s hyper-competitive environment isn’t exactly fertile ground for creative experimentation.

Ironically, the proliferation of streaming services may soon leave us with fewer options than we had in the days of three networks and television with big old knobs on the front.

What do you think, TV fanatics? Are you optimistic about the future of television?

Hit the comments section below to share your thoughts.

The post The Streaming Takeover: Industry Experts Warn That Broadcast and Cable TV May Soon Go Extinct appeared first on TV Fanatic.