Around 2014, years before Apple and Amazon gave it any competition, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings predicted that broadcast TV would die by 2030.
“It's kind of like the horse,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “The horse was good until we had the car.”
It's an attention-grabbing quote, but it's merely punching up an ancient opinion because the deathwatch for “conventional TV,” i.e., cable and broadcast, has been going on for decades. In the early aughts, the fearmongering began when pay TV rapidly expanded. A few more established destinations – your TNTs and your USAs – began drawing larger audiences than programming on smaller channels like UPN and The WB.
Pessimistic diagnosticians tut-tutted at the impending demise of everything from sitcoms. This genre survived several near-death experiences after “Friends” left the air to veteran institutions like PBS, which some proposed was redundant given cable's array of options.
Both are still very much alive, along with linear TV itself. UPN and The WB merged to become The CW, which, against the odds, lives on as well.
This is why these claims are nearly always countered by some bastardization of that quote about its death being greatly exaggerated. Keep that in mind when taking the pulse of broadcast and cable in its current state, which is far from hale and hearty.
According to Nielsen, in July, fewer than 50% of viewers in the United States watched broadcast or cable TV – a historic first. In that same month, around 38.7% of total U.S. TV usage happened via streaming services, with YouTube (not including YouTube TV) and Netflix being the most popular.
Broadcast and cable-originated titles have performed well on Netflix for some time.
This comes at the end of a season when Nielsen's measurements indicate that no broadcast drama or comedy averaged more than 10 million viewers in its season-to-date average. Not even CBS…