In cable, satellite TV land, it’s a ghost town
Netflix’s rise turns tide to streaming
NEW YORK — The list of memorable characters and personalities who entered popular culture through cable television is long:
Honey Boo Boo. Tony Soprano. Lizzie Mcguire. Don Draper. Jon Stewart. Beavis and Butt-head. Chip and Joanna Gaines. Spongebob Squarepants.
Pick your own favorites. Chances are there won’t be many more to join them.
Few cable and satellite networks are a force anymore, the byproduct of sudden changes in how people entertain themselves. Several have lost more than half their audiences in a decade. They’ve essentially become ghost networks, filling their schedules with reruns and barely trying to push toward anything new.
Says Doug Herzog, once an executive at Viacom who oversaw MTV, Comedy Central and other channels: “These networks, which really meant so much to the viewing public and generations that grew up with them, have kind of been left for dead.”
What has been lost?
Pockets of success remain, notably with lifestyle and news programming.
Yet something undeniably has been lost. Stewart’s triumphant return to Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” this winter only begs the question: Did it really have to be this way?
Cable TV primarily took flight in the 1980s, breaking the iron grip of ABC, CBS and NBC. Essentially the first fragmentation of media, cable brought people with common interests together, says Eric Deggans, NPR television critic.
“People who were previously marginalized by the focus on mass culture suddenly got a voice and a connection with other people like them,” Deggans said. “So young music fans worldwide bonded over MTV, Black people and folks who love Black culture bonded over BET, middle-aged women bonded over Lifetime and fans of home remodeling convened around HGTV and old-school TLC.”
Nickelodeon and Disney became de facto baby sitters. CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC changed the political discourse. ESPN occupied sports fans. HBO and Showtime, and later networks like FX and AMC, offered edgier fare.
Networks were endlessly malleable, too. Once MTV recognized there wasn’t much money in music videos — people would change channels when a song they didn’t like came on — the network became a relentless arbiter of cool. Generations had their own touchstones in programs like “Punk’d,” “The Osbournes” and “Total Request Live.”
Now MTV is a ghost. Its average prime-time audience of 256,000 people in 2023 was down from 807,000 in 2014, the Nielsen company said.
Without favorites like “The Walking Dead” or “Better
Call Saul,” AMC’S prime-time viewership sunk 73 percent.
TBS, TNT, History, Lifetime, FX, A&E, BET, E! Entertainment, Syfy, Comedy Central, VH1 and Discovery have all lost at least half of their 2014 audience.
For many, most of the schedules are big blocks of reruns — that’s not appointment TV. It’s accidental. Ghosts.
Inevitable path?
With the explosion of Netflix, the giant companies that dominate the entertainment industry saw that as the future. To a large extent, they’ve concentrated time, energy and resources on these services, launching a competition that still hasn’t shaken out — no one knows yet how many streaming services the market will support and which ones will survive.
Was the downfall of cable the inevitable result? “That’s the gazillion-dollar question,” Herzog said.
“The conglomerates, they definitely jumped the gun, I think, in shifting their assets away from the cable networks and left them as zombies,” said Michael Schneider, television editor at Variety. “They’re paying the price.”
In 2015, some 87 percent of American homes had a cable or satellite television subscription, according to the Nielsen company. By 2023, only 47 percent of homes subscribed. If you include services like Hulu or Youtube TV, the percentage of homes with access to multiple channels was 62 percent last year, Nielsen said.
A survey taken in January by the digital marketing agency Adtaxi found that 73 percent of viewers turned to streaming before cable or broadcast when they sat down to watch TV. Only a year earlier, 42 percent said streaming was their default choice.
Remember couch potatoes? Channel surfers? Now the “Netflix and chill ” generation has taken over.
Reclining before a big screen with a remote control, searching for something to do, is an activity fading with the times, says John Landgraf, chairman of FX Content & Productions and a big-picture thinker of the media industry.
Streaming, and the future
Landgraf ’s FX is one of the few companies keeping its brand strong while making a transition to streaming. “The Bear,” which just won an Emmy for best comedy, is an FX show but available exclusively on the Hulu streaming service. “American Horror Story” is on the actual FX television network
HBO is also making the transition well, while Bravo programming is a strong draw for Peacock.
There are still networks keeping the light on. Fox News Channel is cable’s top-rated network. HGTV’S home remodeling holds up. The Hallmark Channel, with wholesome stories aimed at older women, averaged 929,000 viewers in primetime last year.
Despite the exodus of viewers, ghost networks survive because they still make money for their owners. Cable and satellite systems pay fees to carry them — passed on to consumers, of course — and advertisers buy commercials.
When that changes, all bets are off, and odds are the ghosts will move on.