Tellynomics 52: Is the Shift from Linear to Streaming Starting to Level Out?

We all know the narrative: streaming is the future, linear is dead, the cable iceberg melt is accelerating and will soon be gone. Linear channels are being split off and sidelined, removed from the top table like an embarrassing ageing relative. We’ve read the stories, we get the message, we’re just waiting for the last rites. End of debate.

Just when an idea becomes unchallenged currency, however, it can be time to ask questions. Especially because, when things decline for a period, we often struggle to tell the difference between an extinction event and a less dramatic decline to a new equilibrium. The headline writers will always lean towards the catastrophe prediction, but are they right?

This post offers three observations from the last week or so that suggest that, as regards the rise of streaming and the decline of linear, things are becoming more complex than a simple replacement. There are small hints that streaming might have limits, that linear might have a long-term role to play in an equilibrium in which the two models work in tandem.

RIP streaming-first (in the UK at least)

During ITV’s results this week I was amused to note a confirmation that ITV has changed its approach to ITVX. At launch, and for some time after launch, the strategy seemed to be for major new shows to launch first on ITVX and only appear on linear ITV some time later. This seemed to be drinking the streaming Kool-Aid a bit too much, disrespectful to a large segment of ITV’s audience and likely to fail. Yes, it might help to build the awareness of a service in need of a reboot, but many viewers were not going to change their habits and would just be annoyed. Which meant that viewers would be lost, reducing the return on ITV’s content spend, something it can ill-afford to do.

Sure enough, this approach has been dropped. It is now deemed to be “more effective” to premiere new shows in ITVX and linear, then drop the full box set on ITVX while the rest of the series plays out weekly on linear TV. ITV executives seem to have spotted that the main linear channel still functions as “the biggest marketing platform in the country”. Hurrah for that.

Is the cable melt starting to slow, perhaps even go into reverse?

Meanwhile, the main emblem of the demise of linear in the face of streaming, the centre of all industry metaphors, is “cord cutting”. The phrase derives from the US cable industry, but the language is applied all over the world, even when the primary distribution platform is satellite. The effect has been most profound in the US market – they built the biggest bubble and have endured that most dramatic burst. Even in the US, however, the story is becoming more nuanced than an inexorable straight-line decline to zero.

Chart 1 below shows the recent quarterly TV subscriber figures for the Comcast and Charter operations in the US. The Comcast data aligns with the prevailing narrative of cord-cutting decline without respite, losing nearly 10m customers between Sep-19 and Mar-25. So far so expected.

The Charter data, however, does not fit the story quite so well. Charter TV subs held reasonably steady for the first half of this period when Comcast started to tumble. The expected cord-cutting did then kick in at Charter too, but is there a hint in recent quarters that the decline might be starting to slow? As a first step, it’s helpful to change the scale so we can see the Charter progression more clearly (see Chart 2 below).

This helps to make more clear that that the rollercoaster might be starting to level out. The line is still falling, but more slowly than it was or, as the mathematicians would say, the second derivative has turned positive. Another way to look at this is to plot the quarter-on-quarter changes in Charter’s total TV subscribers (see Chart 3 below).

Here indeed, it is clear that quarter-on-quarter falls, while bouncing around, were persistently negative and generally getting worse, until early 2024. Since then, they seem to be improving and the figure for Jun-25 was a loss of only 80k subscribers in the quarter. But the data is still somewhat tricky to interpret, because of seasonal patterns in changes to subscriber numbers. Chart 4 below removes these seasonal fluctuations by showing a 12m (four quarter) rolling total change.

The de-seasonalised, 12m rolling line shows the clearest picture. Things started to turn for Charter during 2024 and there has been steady improvement ever since. The year to Jun-25 saw a loss of c650k subscribers, down around 5% on the year. Still a decline, but the best performance for three years, and the annual change is improving every quarter.

What’s the Charter secret sauce?

What has changed that might explain this improvement in Charter fortunes? The first candidate is the introduction of more flexible bundling options, allowing customers to select a package of channels and a price point more suited to their needs, including being able to avoid paying for sport if preferred. This was not easy to deliver, and the timing is important, because the upswing started shortly after the big carriage bust-up that Charter had with Disney in Q3 of 2023. After decades of resistance from the channel groups, this deal finally secured the freedom to make these sorts of customer-friendly bundling changes.

The second important development has been that the Charter bundle now includes, at no extra cost, the ad-supported versions of the streamers from all its old channel partners: Disney+, Peacock, ESPN+, Paramount+ and HBO Max. This does not include the new kids on the block – Netflix, Amazon and Apple – but it has dramatically improved value-for-money and, more important, removed the absurdity of making cable customers pay twice to make sure they had access to all of the shows from their favourite content groups.

No big secret then, no genius strategy required, just a concerted effort to fix two of the obvious egregious problems with the cable bundle model.

Where to from here: stabilising at a new equilibrium?

With these changes, is it possible that that cable melt could be nearly over, at Charter at least? Look again at Chart 3 above and extrapolate forwards in your mind. It does not seem too crazy to suggest that the quarterly figure for Sep-25 might be positive for total TV subscribers, helped by the seasonal boost from the start of the NFL season. If it happens, it would be the first positive quarter since Sep-20, five years ago.

Then look at Chart 4 and extrapolate forwards in your mind again. If current patterns persist, it's not too crazy to wonder if Charter might reach year-on-year stability some time in 2026. For Charter, cord-cutting might be at an end and a new stable equilibrium established.

What’s going on at Comcast?

Sadly, the same story does not seem to be playing out at Comcast, as illustrated in Chart 5 below which shows Comcast TV losses on a rolling 12m basis. The worst period for Comcast was the middle of 2023, when they were losing more than 2m TV subscribers on a rolling 12m basis. Things have improved since then, the rate of decline slowing to 1.5m per 12m. But the most recent data points do not allow for great optimism.

Comcast might hope that the line in Chart 5 continues its upwards trajectory, in which case they might reach a point of stability some time around 2030 or beyond. Or they might worry that the line is starting to level out, heading for a plateau around 1.2m loss per annum, in which the decline just keeps going at a steady rate.

Why the stark difference? Perhaps Comcast has struggled more than Charter because of its greater skew towards bigger cities, and so greater exposure to homes with access to fibre broadband. Such homes might be more likely to switch to streaming generally, or to vMVPD competitors (such as Fubo, Hulu+Live or YouTubeTV).

Perhaps, but I also suspect that the Comcast longstanding reputation for poor customer service and lack of customer-centricity has not served them well in this period. And there is also a hint that, consistent with this reputation, they have not been as assiduous as Charter in working to fix some of the obvious problems with the cable story.

And yet, Comcast plans a new linear cable channel?

The Comcast experience still dominates the cable narrative, because they were the largest when the melt started, even though they are now smaller than Charter. The contrast between the two operators suggests that the Comcast decline is more about careless neglect and poor strategy rather than some kind of exogenous inevitability.

In which case it is deeply ironic that NBC (Comcast-owned) is reported to be planning to launch a new, linear cable channel. They seem to have concluded this is needed to bring their new NBA games (starting next season) to the residual cable base. This seems to be a recognition that relying on the Peacock streamer to show all the NBA games not broadcast on the main NBC channel is not going to do the job, because some sports fans are still on cable, and still orient their viewing around linear channels. And, as above, some of them are starting to show signs of staying put for the long term, at least on Charter cable systems.

Perhaps this means they Comcast is changing its tune and wondering if there might be life in the old linear dog yet? If so, they could do worse than ask Charter for a copy of their playbook on how to run a customer-centric cable business.