Saturday, February 15, 2025

TV > The End

For the first time in the history of the broadcast, the Oscars will be streamed live outside of the pay TV ecosystem, on Disney’s Hulu, alongside its broadcast home on ABC.

Now that pay TV will have little if any exclusive content, the floodgates will likely open to more creative bundling of channels, with providers perhaps hoping that skinnier bundles with more niche genres can be stickier for consumers and provide the value proposition that long ago left the basic bundle.

Person looking at a TV in a museum — Illustration by C.J. Burton

The End of TV Is Here

As the final few holdouts (like the Oscars) ink streaming deals, a monumental shift in the way Hollywood works is underway.

February 12, 2025

In fact, 14 of the top 50 TV broadcasts in 2024 were exclusive to pay TV bundle services, according to data from Nielsen, all of them football games on Fox or ESPN (CBS streams its games on Paramount+, while NBC Sports events are on Peacock). The Oscars also cracked the top 100.

Come next year, that number will be 0 of 50. Every single thing on Nielsen’s most watched list will be available in a stand-alone streamer in addition to the big bundles.

To be certain, the migration to streaming has been slow and steady. Entertainment programming pivoted to on-demand streaming years ago thanks to Netflix. Disney, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount all fell in line accordingly. As Hollywood began to pour billions of dollars into streaming, cable channels became husks of their former selves. Brands like TNT and USA, which had full slates of scripted fare, shed most of that, while others like FX and Bravo became channels that doubled as genre sub-brands for Hulu and Peacock.

“We actually are at a point where the linear networks in our company are not a burden at all, they're actually an asset,” Disney CEO Bob Iger told Wall Street analysts Feb. 5. “We are programming them and funding them at levels that actually give us the ability to enhance our overall television business, that obviously includes and leans into streaming, which, let's face it, is really the future of the television business.”