TV Power Chord

How Can TV Survive?

Happy Monday War & Peaceniks. Let’s talk TV turkey.

It’s no secret that the US Pay TV market is in freefall. But America can take solace in the fact that we are not alone. Pay TV has the same sad story for our Canuck neighbors to the north…

Y nuestras vecinas LATAM del sur…

On the European continent…

In our original motherland, the UK…

Auch in Deutschland!

Y también para España…

Thanks to my partners at Ampere Analysis, I could do this for the entire globe. But trust me - this is a worldwide trend.

Yes, subscribers are giving up Pay TV. But the bigger drivers of this nosedive are Millennials and Gen Z starting their own homes and never taking up the cord… aka the Cord Nevers.

The good news for all these regions is that paid streaming revenue is on the rise.

The problem with this? As streaming markets mature around the world, growth for SVOD revenues in each region slow. Sure, many premium streamers are adding ads for better ARPU, but that business is growing up quite slowly for now.

The bigger problem? Streaming revenues from subscriptions and advertising are not close to replacing the quickly shrinking revenues from Pay TV and traditional TV ads. In no region is this financial swap a 1:1 trade. This is why the American Media Industrial Complex is bailing water with a leaky bucket. It’s why everyone now mandatorily describes Warner Bros Discovery (aka Disco Bros) as “beleaguered.” And it is why Paramount is being bought off the discount rack by the Ellison family.

In most regions, Big Tech is filling the void. Netflix, Amazon, and Google/YouTube (aka NAG) are scooping up eyeballs and revenues traditional Media are dropping. This is especially true, and accelerating, in the US, where Netflix has 84 million subscribers, YouTube is the #1 channel on TV with 10% of all CTV viewing, and Amazon is invading the TV ad business with vim, vigor, and Thursday Night Football.

[WARNING: Take the data in the chart below with a grain of salt. It is based on a Group M report as well as accounts from “people close to the business.”]