TV has been changing for years, but the real inflection point came during COVID. What had been a gradual shift from cable to streaming accelerated almost overnight—and the consequences are still unfolding across audience behavior, content strategy, and advertiser investment.
In the latest episode of Media Monitor, Kelly Sweeney and Sean Wright unpack what the data shows about TV in 2025, why streaming overtook cable, and what marketers should expect as the market heads into 2026.
Streaming Overtook Cable During COVID—And Never Looked Back
The pandemic marked the moment when streaming moved from a secondary viewing option to the dominant way households consumed TV content.
In 2017, roughly 65% of U.S. households still had a cable subscription, while only about 30% streamed content in some form. By 2020, that relationship had essentially flipped, as stay-at-home behavior accelerated adoption and pushed more viewers toward on-demand platforms. Today, about 83% of households stream, while only around 36% still rely on cable or set-top box viewing.
This was not just a U.S. phenomenon. Similar patterns have played out across other major markets, reinforcing that the pressure on broadcasters is structural, not regional.
Linear TV Responded by Pulling Back on New Content
As audience habits changed, linear TV operators tried to respond. There was a temporary surge in investment in new shows during 2020 and 2021, suggesting networks understood the competitive threat and attempted to hold attention with fresh programming.
But that effort did not last.
By 2025, only about 10% of linear TV revenue was tied to new shows, down from roughly 15% before the pandemic and even higher during the short-lived COVID-era push. In practice, this means more schedules filled with reruns and lower-cost programming, and fewer new reasons for viewers to stay engaged with traditional TV.
That creates a self-reinforcing cycle: less new content leads to lower engagement, which drives more viewers to streaming, which in turn makes it harder for linear networks to justify new content investment.
Live Sports Have Become the Core of Linear TV
If one format has held linear TV together, it is live sports.
In 2017, live sports represented about 19% of overall linear TV revenue. By 2025, that figure is expected to reach roughly 40%. That is a remarkable shift in less than a decade and underscores just how central sports have become to the economics of traditional television.
The reason is straightforward. Sports remain one of the few truly live, appointment-viewing experiences left in the market. Audiences want to watch in real time, advertisers value the immediacy and scale, and broadcasters can build additional wraparound programming before and after the main event.
In many ways, live sports are no longer just part of linear TV—they are increasingly what linear TV is.
Some Advertisers Still Depend on TV, Even as Others Pull Back
The decline in linear TV does not mean advertisers have abandoned it completely. Some categories still see clear value in the format.
Restaurants remain active on TV, particularly around live sports, where short-term promotional offers can drive quick consumer response. Financial services also continue to invest, especially in categories where broad awareness and trust still matter.
At the same time, a large share of advertiser categories have reduced linear budgets. Sean noted that around two-thirds of the subcategories Guideline tracks cut linear TV spend in 2025, the highest share since COVID. Pharmaceuticals stand out in particular. After becoming an increasingly important source of TV revenue over the past several years, the category showed a notable pullback in late 2025—something that could create additional pressure on the medium going forward.
The takeaway is not that TV has lost all value. It is that its value is becoming more concentrated in specific formats, moments, and advertiser use cases.
Streaming Is Growing—But Not Fast Enough to Replace Linear Losses
One of the most important insights from the episode is that dollars leaving linear TV are not flowing cleanly into streaming.
It might seem natural to assume that if advertisers cut spending on a show in linear, they would simply shift that budget to the same or similar content on streaming. But the data suggests otherwise. For every dollar that leaves linear TV, only about twenty-five cents is being reinvested into streaming.
That gap matters.
It helps explain why streaming can still be growing while the overall TV ecosystem is under pressure. Streaming growth has already slowed meaningfully, decelerating from the high teens or around 20% growth to closer to 9% in Guideline’s data last year. And increasingly, that growth is being driven by programmatic enablement rather than pure demand expansion alone.
This suggests that streaming is entering a more mature phase—one where growth continues, but at a far more measured pace than the market became used to in earlier years.
Consumers Are Becoming More Selective About Subscriptions
Another major shift shaping the future of TV is consumer behavior around subscriptions.
Early streaming had a strong economic advantage over cable. A household could subscribe to multiple services for far less than the cost of a cable bundle, often without ads and with much more flexibility. That advantage has narrowed considerably.
Today, the cost of subscribing to multiple streaming services can approach—or in some cases exceed—the cost of traditional cable, especially for consumers who want premium tiers, sports access, or a wide range of content. At the same time, the user experience has become more fragmented, with viewers managing multiple apps, billing relationships, and content libraries.
As a result, many consumers are no longer subscribing to everything at once. Instead, they are rotating in and out of services depending on what they want to watch at a given moment. This “subscription cycling” behavior reflects a more selective and cost-conscious audience, and it adds another layer of volatility for both platforms and advertisers.
What This Means for TV in 2026
Looking ahead, the direction of travel is clear even if the pace remains uneven.
Linear TV will continue to lean heavily on live sports and a narrower set of advertiser categories. Streaming will keep growing, but not at a rate that fully offsets linear’s decline. Programmatic will likely play an even larger role in how streaming inventory is bought and sold. And consumer price sensitivity will continue to shape how people assemble—and reassemble—their viewing habits.
The bigger point is that the TV market is no longer moving through a simple substitution story where cable declines and streaming rises at the same rate. Instead, it is becoming a more fragmented, more selective, and more economically complex ecosystem.
That is what makes planning harder—but also more important.
The Media Monitor Mission
Media Monitor exists to bring clarity to the trends reshaping media, advertising, and consumer behavior.
New episodes drop every Wednesday on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, covering the market shifts that matter most to media, advertising, and strategy teams.
At Guideline, our mission is to bring transparency and control to the media lifecycle. If you want to better understand shifts like these—and how they should inform your media strategy—connect with our team to learn more and stay ahead.
