Is cable TV dying?

Variety

As streaming increasingly becomes the future of television, the model for cable TV is falling apart. That could be seen in MTV, which earlier this year seemed to be giving up by devoting 113 of its 168 weekly hours to showing reruns of Ridiculousness. "Pundits had long predicted the death of broadcast TV, while basic cable feasted on a dual revenue stream of subscriber fees and advertising revenue," explain Variety's Michael Schneider and Kate Aurthur. "But that gravy train started going off the rails when the streaming services arrived. At first, Netflix was a friend, supplying yet another source of revenue and even acting as a marketing tool — helping to turn AMC’s Breaking Bad into a much bigger hit during its final season of originals on AMC, for example. But as AMC soon learned, consumers began thinking of Breaking Bad as a Netflix show — and Netflix was using acquired library content to quickly change viewer habits. Last year, the streamer launched more original programming than the entire cable TV industry had a decade earlier. Meanwhile, 'cord cutting,' once pooh-poohed by the cable industry as a myth, has become a real threat: The number of pay-TV households peaked in 2010 at 105 million; now it’s down to approximately 82.9 million. And a study last year by eMarketer forecast that number to dip to 72.7 million by 2023. Now, it’s cable that’s on the ropes — and struggling for survival...While a handful of lifestyle and older-skewing networks have managed to buck industry-wide declines, most general entertainment channels have suffered double-digit drops in ratings in recent years. According to Variety’s tally of the most-watched networks in 2019, Nick at Nite was down 24% among total viewers; AMC, down 22%; FX, down 21%; USA, down 19%; TBS, down 16%; and TNT, down 14%." FX Networks CEO John Landgraf says the rise of streaming and the decline of cable led to the creation of FX on Hulu. “You’re just doing everything you can to run in place as a basic cable network,” he says. “It allows us to maintain — even increase a little bit — our investment in our programming for our linear channels … but where all the growth from investment in the television industry is, is in streaming.”