The Great TV Shift: Why Cable & Broadcast Are Losing the War
February 13, 2026 - 28 minutes read
NOTE: This blog is a transcript from a podcast and therefore may contain errors.
Shannon Allen: Welcome to Digital Marketing, ROI. I’m your host Shannon Allen, and I’m joined by my favorite co-host, Krystal Vivian.
Krystal Vivian: Shannon.
Shannon Allen: Happy February. Shannon.
Krystal Vivian: Shannon. Happy February.
It’s crazy that it’s already February and we’re almost halfway through the month.
Shannon Allen: I know.
Krystal Vivian: Usually February, drags on forever.
Shannon Allen: We’re gonna be in our bathing suits before you know it. I’m gonna be on my boat before you know it. How about that?
Krystal Vivian: I’ll take that.
Shannon Allen: bring thrilled
Krystal Vivian: that it’s
Shannon Allen: 40 degrees out. Maybe we need to do a podcast on the pontoon boat.
Krystal Vivian: I love that idea.
Shannon Allen: I could do that with sound.
Krystal Vivian: No. It’ll sound terrible, but we’ll have a great time.
Shannon Allen: We’ll have a great time. We’ll just play music during the whole podcast.
How’s that?
Krystal Vivian: There you go.
Shannon Allen: All right. I’m excited. February is the month of. Streaming tv. I wanna talk about streaming. I wanna talk about CTV, I wanna talk about how the year is shaping up and I did a training on this with the team and there’s just so much information that I think is gonna be really good for our listeners.
Do you agree?
Krystal Vivian: I agree and I think that it’s something that we’ve been talking about for a long time but that’s because so much is changing with it so fast. now is really the time for businesses to make their moves and start investing and getting into the CTV space.
Shannon Allen: Absolutely. And what we’re gonna do today for our listeners is we’re gonna talk about what’s really happening. Which is one of the biggest shifts in advertising right now, which is honestly the collapse of cable and broadcast TV viewership and why streaming has permanently taken the throne. So today in part one, we’re gonna really break down the data and talk about understanding viewership between cable and broadcast versus streaming, right?
And where consumers, business owners need to be moving their money because of where consumers are.
Krystal Vivian: Yep.
Shannon Allen: let’s get into it. I’ll let you ask me some questions and hopefully when we’re done, our listeners will have a good idea of where they should be spending their money.
Krystal Vivian: Absolutely. Shannon, I’d like to start right there with consumer behavior and how. That what’s changed? Because we’ve all been streaming for years, right? Yes. And we’ve been watching streaming grow for years, but December, 2025, so just two months ago, Nielsen data shows that there’s a huge tipping point.
Probably the biggest ones so far. Can you walk us through what happened and why business owners need to be paying attention?
Shannon Allen: Yeah. So let’s backtrack a little. I’m gonna give a stat that we’ve talked about many times on the podcast, which is back in May was really where the tipping point started.
Nielsen came out with numbers in May, where finally streaming had. Moved past the combination of cable and broadcast together, it was at almost 45% versus combined cable and broadcast that was just under 44%. we started talking about this with our clients way back then.
However as the end of the year rolled around I went to pull numbers, as I was going out to talk to a client that does spend a substantial amount of money in cable, what I really was able to show our client It’s okay to run on cable and broadcast, but you also have to match the viewership to your budget.
It cannot be skewed. the biggest notes that happened in Nielsen’s the Gauge, which is their statistical information from all of their surveys in December of 2025, it hit streaming, hit an all time record of 47.5%. Of all TV viewing so that shattered the previous record. That was back in July of 2025.
Meanwhile, cable dropped to its lowest level ever recorded, just 20.2% of TV viewing. right behind that is broadcast tv. they’re neck and neck there, right? So now we’re moving up to that 50% of viewership, and then everything else below it is living in the cable, in the broadcast.
And keep in mind when we say. Cable is at 20%. that box sitting on somebody’s TV is 20% of viewership When we talk about broadcast, If that percentage is 20% and you are buying on your local CBS station or your local NBC station. You’re not 20% of your ship, you’re a percentage of all the major networks combined.
Correct. A, B, C, N, B, C, Fox, right? All of those combined make up that 20% mark. Yes. So if you might be buying something that’s only getting five to 8% of viewership, but you’re spending the bulk of your money there,
Krystal Vivian: and you have to guess that is where your target audience.
Is spending their time watching, even if they are watching broadcast. You’re guessing that they’re watching the local NBC station, or you’re guessing that they’re watching Bravo on cable?
Shannon Allen: Exactly. it comes down to the math Follow the math and follow the consumer journey.
So that’s really the big thing that I wanted to talk about. To kick this off, is to start to think about does your budget match up to the viewership and really dissect that as a whole. That was where my client was buying cable, but the bulk of their streaming budget was going to cable, yet their inventory was running on the cable box, not on the streaming box.
And a good portion of that budget was going to life sports, which is gonna be our part two of today’s podcast. We’ll get to life sports and how that affects these particular numbers. what I want our listeners to think about right now is viewership. Viewership of streaming as a whole, and now there’s a lot of things that run under streaming, right?
We’re talking Netflix, we know alone. Netflix alone covers 9% of that 50%, and I’m using 50 just to round it up.
Krystal Vivian: Yeah.
Shannon Allen: Prime Video 4.3, paramount streaming, 2.5 Roku, channel 3%. And then what’s not included in there, which is that extra other, probably 20% are what we call the multi-platform. Video on demand, which is or subscription is YouTube tv. The Hulus, the Hulu, live
Krystal Vivian: Hulu lives the slings.
Shannon Allen: Yes. That’s what makes up. That other percent. Just on a side note, weirdly enough, Christmas Day was, became the most stream day in TV history with 55.1 billion viewing minutes in a single day, shattering the previous record by 8%.
Krystal Vivian: Games well in Chris, but all
Shannon Allen: the sports games were on stream.
Krystal Vivian: Netflix.
Shannon Allen: Yep. I predicted we’ll talk about that. a year ago I told a client The tide is turning. You will be watching everything you wanna do on streaming for sports in the future.
Krystal Vivian: I think we talked about that on a podcast. I’ll have to go back and find out which one, but I’m pretty sure we talked about that on a podcast too. Yes. So cable’s at its lowest point ever. Let’s look into the rest of 2026. where do we expect the industry to go? Where do experts think that we’re heading for cable through the rest of 2026?
And at what point does cable really become unsustainable for advertisers?
Shannon Allen: Great question. Industry analyst Evan Shapiro, predicts cable will drop another 13.4% year over year from July, 2025 to July of 2026, which had put it about 18 to 19% of TV by mid 2026. So now we’re below that 20% mark.
Right.
That’s crucial. You know when streaming is predicted to cross the 50% line and cable keeps losing that viewership, that is crazy. One of the stats I pulled was that cable penetration has dropped from 88% of US households in 2010 to below 38%. That’s a 50 point decline.
And something that I was asked by one of my clients was, don’t you think the affluent buyer is the older generation and they’re sitting with a cable box? And I said, it is an older audience. I can tell you it’s not a younger audience, but let’s think about that. Do you want to reach the 65 plus?
My mom’s 75. She streams. She doesn’t have a cable box.
Krystal Vivian: Yep.
Shannon Allen: Everything is streaming.
Krystal Vivian: My parents are 60, my father-in-law is 70, and they all stream everything. I think my parents have satellite, but it’s just for the local sports.
That’s it.
Shannon Allen: Yeah. an older generation has more money to spend, but if you’re talking about retirees, they’re not spending the way that I am at 55.
Krystal Vivian: Right.
Shannon Allen: I’m his audience.
Krystal Vivian: Yes.
Shannon Allen: And I haven’t been on the satellite for five years,
Krystal Vivian: hundred percent.
Shannon Allen: So yeah, that’s where we’re seeing with cable specifically,
Krystal Vivian: blah.
Shannon Allen: That’s okay.
Krystal Vivian: So let’s talk about cable and broadcast together because that makes up around 40%
Shannon Allen: Yep.
Krystal Vivian: But beyond just fewer eyeballs, we know that there are less people watching cable and broadcast, what’s the fundamental problem that business owners are facing if they put their video budgets into traditional tv?
Shannon Allen: Let’s talk about TV as a whole, or let’s talk about broadcast first. I wanna keep saying cable and broadcast. Here’s where it gets confusing. I wanna explain this a little bit better, where what cable does is cable has the ability to watch. All the broadcast channels. cable does have a value that broadcast doesn’t have.
Broadcast is still gonna be there, but you might be with your local CBS station and they have a very fragmented way that your inventory gets delivered, right? It might be to somebody still using antennas. Most of the smart TVs now come with built-in antenna just to get your local channels if you’re able to, right?
Then you have. broadcast networks are on fast channels, which is the free, the Pluto TVs, the Tuby. They’re also on cable. So this is where it gets confusing, is that broadcast is in a category on its own, but when you’re watching broadcast channel on a cable box, it actually gets counted towards that.
Does that make sense?
Krystal Vivian: there’s some overlap there.
Shannon Allen: There’s some overlap where I really want to talk about, beyond just fewer eyeballs. With some of the problems that broadcast shares, the DVR ad skipping. over 50% of primetime viewing is time shifted. if you’re watching anything on broadcast, whether you’re using cable or satellite, you’re skipping it, right?
You got the DVR information going through, even if they’re getting it on YouTube tv, which is streaming. There is the DVR. It’s the fast that does a really good job, but that’s all streaming. you wanna be on something like fast because they can’t skip your commercial?
Krystal Vivian: No.
Shannon Allen: The seasonal and inconsistency in broadcast.
So it fluctuates between 18.5% and 23.5% based on sports seasons. one of the other struggles that they deal with is, to me TV has a different kind of seasonality, but overall people consuming content, don’t put it into a season, but it does happen that way for broadcast.
Krystal Vivian: It does.
Shannon Allen: We’re coming into another political year for midterms so this year they’re gonna, broadcast is also gonna face, what they’ve always faced is commercials get bumped and you’re dealing with a political age.
Krystal Vivian: it’s gonna be a big year.
Shannon Allen: One of the flaws with cable and broadcast is wasted reach. Zone based buying and cable. DMA buying, for what I can do with streaming I have the ability with when I stream. To, if I am a business owner, a tire company that owns businesses in Indiana and Illinois, I would have to buy multiple TV stations to hit the DMA or, multiple buys with different cable companies specifically.
I don’t have to do that with streaming. I can be very specific with my zip codes and make sure that my delivery is there, right? We’ll talk about sports. Live sports is a little different. You usually, when you’re buying live sports, you still are buying more DMA buying if you wanna guarantee some of those buys, that’s a different conversation.
But yeah, those are two things right off the bat that I think about that are definitely flaws that is gonna hurt somebody that’s still living. With their budget over with cable or broadcast. So bottom line, high cost for a declining audience with zero attribution. So we didn’t even talk about attribution.
It’ll be my ROI conversation. I think what’s happening is clients used to say, we’ve just always bought this way. we’re very loyal and I appreciate the loyalty. Just make sure your budget reflects that. if you’re spending 300,000 a year and trying to reach people through video and you spend the bulk of that on cable or a local TV buy, you really need to look at that budget and figure out how to build that viewership into a 70% viewership, not a 20% viewership.
Krystal Vivian: Yeah. it’s been a pretty grim
Shannon Allen: I know. I know. Anybody listening if I get any sellers that listen from our competition, they’re probably like, geez, Shannon, can you give us a break here?
Krystal Vivian: Yeah. it’s not to say that there’s not value there, it’s just that the value has shifted and it is a smaller audience.
And like you said, your budget has to reflect that. And it’s not that anything that they’re doing wrong, it’s just that changing nature of consumer behavior. And as, as consumers, when we change, what we do and how we spend our time Businesses that are advertising need to make changes too, because you have to meet people where they are.
if you’re spending $300,000 on commercials that are getting seen by maybe 8% of your audience, hopefully.
Shannon Allen: Yeah.
Krystal Vivian: that’s bad math. That’s really bad math. Let’s talk about what streaming and CTV actually solve for advertisers.
And you’ve hinted at a couple of times, we mentioned a couple of things, but I wanna have it all in one cluster. What makes streaming fundamentally better for business owners who are trying to reach their customers?
Shannon Allen: Okay, I will, I’ll break it down. Just a couple things to think about. Number one I’m gonna say better reach and.
And I don’t know if the word better because when you’re talking 20% versus 50% right. But we know that when about 48% of all TV viewing. Is happening through streaming that’s where the viewership is, then we know that is a real much stronger reach without having to buy multiple networks to get there.
number two, Precision targeting. So we can do more zip code level, we can work with first party DA data and layer in a GF. We can really high, we layer in those behaviors. We can layer in, search retargeting. We have much more flexibility for targeting between geography and keywords and audience segments than you’re gonna get ever with broadcast cable’s.
Closest thing to targeting is who’s watching sports versus who’s watching Bravo. Much different, If you’re picking one channel on cable with only 20% of viewership, you go down to about one or 2% of an audience, right? You gotta keep running the numbers and chunk it down.
Number three, attribution. that ties into that targeting. I can track to somebody’s watch that commercial and then came back to my website in 30 days. I can tell the completion rates. Are they watching it all the way through? we can do store visits if we’re tying in a geofencing campaign to that.
So full customer journey tracking as best as we can. Now we know that consumers on smart TV delivery are not clicking on it, but they sure can watch it and come back to your website. And there’s huge value on that we’ve never been able to do with broadcaster cable.
Krystal Vivian: And then, yeah, we’ve talked about the.
Second screen phenomenon for years, right? Yes. Of people watching tv but having their phones or tablets in front of them Absolutely. I can tell you multiple stories about watching something and then, oh, that looks really cool. And looking it up on my phone in that exact moment
Shannon Allen: who said it to me the other day, I can’t even remember who I was talking to and they said my why, somebody’s watched my husband’s watching sports on TV and I’m catching up on my Bravo tv, my Real Housewives on my phone while he’s watching that. And they’re in the same room.
Krystal Vivian: They’re in the same room but they’re watching two different screens.
Shannon Allen: Yeah. And by the way, that phone, that is really big attribution because they can click on that and go right to my page
Krystal Vivian: Yes.
Shannon Allen: Huge value.
Krystal Vivian: Absolutely.
Shannon Allen: And then last but not least, I would say flexible budgets. CTV is not inexpensive. It’s more expensive than some things, but it’s not more expensive than broadcast or cable. It’s not, you buy what you know, you pay what you get for.
So if you’re looking at about the same rates with more targeting and higher viewership. The ROI, I’m already answering our last question, but
Krystal Vivian: Yeah, geez. Didn’t even gimme a chance.
Shannon Allen: those are the main things I want a business owner to think about from the problems that CTV can solve.
Krystal Vivian: let’s talk about the ROI specifically, How can businesses adjust their budgets to get a better ROI on their marketing, and what should they actually do right now with this information?
Shannon Allen: So I don’t expect anybody to shift a hundred percent overnight. In fact, I don’t advise that. Just start by matching your allocation to actual viewership, and then let’s just do the math. If a business is spending, 240, a year on cable, if you matched viewership, about a hundred to 115 of that would go towards streaming, and about 45,000 would go towards cable.
That’s a massive rebalance. But that is how it should match. The ROI difference really With cable. You’re guessing With streaming, you have a better, it’s not as good as what I can do with SEM because SEM is really telling me what’s going on. It’s not as good as what I can do with e-commerce.
I know who’s buying that, but it sure does tell us more information than. Broadcast or cable has ever been able to tell, which is ROI in itself, we can see that things are starting to change. And when it really comes to R-O-I-R-O, I has to always follow the consumer journey. So if that’s where viewership is, follow the consumer journey and the RO, I will follow that.
Krystal Vivian: Absolutely. I love that. That’s a beautiful clip right there.
Shannon Allen: A beautiful clip right there. You’re envisioning your editing moments, right?
Krystal Vivian: Yes. we’re putting that on social. Yes. If you follow the consumer journey and make sure that you’re matching your marketing throughout each step and telling the stories where you need to tell the stories, getting them when they’re searching with SEM, you’re gonna see the money.
customers will come to you and they will buy from you.
Shannon Allen: Show me the money. I’m aging myself. What movie was that? Jerry McGuire.
Krystal Vivian: Yep. Jerry McGuire. I watched that movie.
Shannon Allen: Okay.
Krystal Vivian: I might have been. when it came out it was like,
Shannon Allen: exactly.
Krystal Vivian: 20 years after it
Shannon Allen: came out.
All right. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in today. Remember, this is just part one, and in our next episode in two weeks, we’re gonna be diving into live sports and streaming, because if you think sports are still keeping cable alive, wait until you hear these numbers.
thanks for joining us and tune into our next episode of Digital Marketing, ROI.