It's official: Streaming overtakes cable and network as king of TV

In May, more Americans watched TV on streaming than on cable and network TV

By John Koblin

 

The streaming future is now the streaming present.

 

Americans watched more television via streaming services than they did through cable and broadcast networks in the month of May, Nielsen said in a report on Tuesday. It is the first time that has happened over a full month.

 

Nielsen began comparing streaming viewership with traditional network and cable television in 2021. At that time, even with streaming on a rapid ascent, the gap between the two was huge: Nearly two-thirds of all TV time was spent watching cable and broadcast, and just 26 percent was with streaming.

 

That lead has now collapsed. Here’s how streaming overtook traditional TV.

 

Boomers clinched it

 

It’s no surprise that younger viewers were the first to jump to streaming. But another group has since made the leap as well: viewers over the age of 65.

 

Older viewers watch a lot of television, more than any other cohort — one-third of all viewing comes from this group. And they have been moving to streaming in droves in the last few years — particularly to platforms that are free and require no subscription. For instance, since 2023, viewers over 65 are the fastest-growing age group for watching YouTube off a television set. Their YouTube watch time last month grew 106 per cent from May 2023, Nielsen said. And the amount they’re watching on YouTube is equal to the viewing totals of children under 11 — another age group that watches a ton of TV, and YouTube in particular.

 

Older viewers have taken to free streaming services like Tubi, Roku, and Pluto with gusto. In May, the three services accounted for 5.7 per cent of television time for people of all ages, more than Disney+ and Hulu combined. The free platforms “have ads, but, for that demo, it’s not particularly jarring because they’re used to watching ads,” said Brian Fuhrer, a senior vice president of product strategy at Nielsen.

 

Cable companies stopped original programming

 

Cable TV viewing has fallen much more than network television over the last four years — 39 per cent overall, Nielsen said. What has surprised industry analysts is just how much media companies themselves have helped accelerate the decline.

 

Cable networks like USA, TBS and MTV were rich with original programming just a few years ago, but they air few scripted shows now. That is because media executives have rapidly reordered their budgets, steering investment toward their streaming services. As a result, many of the channels are effectively zombie networks that do little more than play marathons of “Law & Order: SVU,” “The Office” or “Jaws.” In turn, viewers started to give up, as did advertisers. Now, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery executives are genuinely throwing in the towel on cable altogether — both are spinning off the vast majority of their cable holdings into separate companies.

 

Subscriptions to niche streaming services — like Hallmark+, BritBox, and Crunchyroll — have grown sharply over the past couple of years, filling a role that used to belong to specialty cable networks.

 

The bulwarks of broadcast have fallen

 

Compared with cable, broadcast television has been surprisingly resilient: a 20 per cent drop over the past four years, or about half as much as cable’s.

 

“It’s like high tides and low tides,” Fuhrer said of network television. “The big events on broadcast are as big as they’ve ever been. But the lows are lower.”

 

But even those big events — long the bulwarks of broadcast — are no longer exclusive to broadcast. NBC heavily promoted the network’s Olympics coverage on the company’s streaming service, Peacock, for example. And viewership of the Super Bowl set a new ratings record this year, which surprised many industry insiders because the game was a blowout. But there was a major reason: For the first time, Fox, the company with broadcast rights to the game, also streamed the game live on Tubi. More than 13 million people watched the game on Tubi. The Oscars streamed on Hulu for the first time in March. And come September, two more key pillars of broadcast will fall. “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune” will run new episodes on Hulu and Peacock this fall, in addition to airing in syndication. That move could be a precursor to a blockbuster deal in three years when those game shows could move solely to streaming.

 

Netflix and YouTube have been the big winners

 

In 1999, when the internet was still slow and cable and broadcast were in their glory days, Ted Sarandos had a job interview with Reed Hastings, a co-founder of Netflix. At that point, Netflix’s business consisted of putting DVDs in red envelopes and mailing them to subscribers. It would be eight more years before Netflix started streaming movies and TV shows. But it was still the first to streaming, and its singular status in Hollywood today is without question. Netflix accounted for about 8 per cent of all TV time in May. The firm has been eclipsed by only one other player: YouTube, which accounted for about 13 per cent of all TV time. And the winners are not yet finished “What we really are focused on,” Sarandos said this year, “is the 80 per cent of TV watching that is not on Netflix or YouTube today.”