Viewers Are Quiet Quitting Pay TV

For many years you have heard me talk about how the “massive wave” of cord cutting is not happening. 

That the various MVPDs were only losing a percentage or two of their total subscriber base each quarter and that while they were certainly not growing, the exit was far from a “massive wave.”

“Slow trickle” was more like it.

You may have also heard me say that this was not proof that the cable business was thriving, that it was most definitely in trouble and that while the 10 million plus people who had switched from MVPDs to vMVPDs were keeping the number of pay TV subscribers fairly steady, vMVPDs were just a temporary way station.

Which is sort of where we are now.

Most people still have a pay TV subscription. The problem is many of them are barely using it.

They have it so they can watch live sports, which is still, for now, mostly on linear TV. 

They have it so they can watch CNN and otherr national cable news services on Election Night or during times of war or natural disasters.

They have it so they can watch the local news, something that for many is no longer a nightly habit.

But mostly they have it out of habit, because most of their viewing is now on streaming and that’s a trend that is not going to reverse itself.

Which is the problem that cable and broadcast are facing right now.

It’s not that people are cutting the cord on them, it’s that they’re doing the TV equivalent of “quiet quitting” — they’re still subscribing, they’re just not watching a whole lot of pay TV anymore. 

Yes, there are exceptions. Shows like Yellowstone come out of the blue and shock everyone in Hollywood by racking up 14 million viewers for a season opener that’s gotten no buzz in the mainstream press.

But mostly they’re not watching as streaming has now surpassed both broadcast and cable (separately, not together) as the place most Americans do their TV viewing..

For linear broadcast and cable networks, that means lower ratings, lower CPMs and lower revenue. It also means that the next time carriage and retrans fees are up for negotiation, the broadcast and cable networks will get even less money.

It means that the MVPDs are all trying to figure out how to offer some sort of streaming bundle, given that any sort of pay TV is really just a loss leader at this point, a way to create stickiness, and if their bundle is more attractive than the next guy’s then that’s a plus.

You’ve also heard me say that cord cutting has a floor.

This is also true. There are somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of households who are only going to give up cable TV when someone takes it away from them. Even if they hardly ever watch it.

Which is why the denouement of all this is going to be so messy.

At some point it’s not going to be profitable for many cable networks to keep the lights on.

The revenue they get from carriage fees and advertising won’t justify the expense of running a 24/7 cable network. So they’ll either sell off their assets, or, if they’re smart, become something akin to a studio, where they produce 10 to 20 hours of original programming a week and license it, along with their library content, to the various FASTs and SVOD services who can add it in to their on-demand and linear offerings. 

(Oddly enough, I offered up a similar idea seven years ago in my book  Over The Top. How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Proving that a broken clock is right at least twice a day.)

The broadcast networks will likely do what they’ve long been threatening to do— bring their programming over to their streaming services and park them there while letting their lawyers and the FCC hammer out what, if anything, is to become of their owned and operated broadcast stations and of all the affiliate broadcast stations. (There’s a chance they may all be reincarnated on streaming in some form, but that battle is going to be fierce.)

As for when this all goes down, that’s a tough one.

For ten years or more, we’ve all been predicting the death or at least the massive dimunation of traditional pay TV. 

It’s proven far more resilient. 

Streaming still needs to figure out transparency and measurement before big national advertisers, the ones who run hundred million dollar image campaigns, fully commit to shifting those millions to streaming. (See our upcoming report on Advertising on the FASTs for more on that.)

So not in the next year or two. But not in the amorphous “at some point in the future” either. 

That’s about as close as I’m willing to come to a guess in terms of timing, though I will leave you with a quote from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: 

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”