I Wrote a Whole Book About Cable’s Rise and Fall. Then the NFL Apparently Performed CPR.
Well.
This is awkward.
Not long ago, I wrote an entire book called Channelmania: Cable TV’s Rise & Fall and the 100 Shows That Made the Medium.
Notice something important about that title.
It says:
RISE & FALL.
Not:
RISE & FALL & WEIRDLY HANG AROUND FOR ANOTHER 30 YEARS BECAUSE YOUR DAD WANTS TO WATCH THE PACKERS.
This week, Business Insider’s Peter Kafka reported something I wasn’t expecting.
Cable television—or more accurately, the larger pay-TV bundle—may actually have a floor.
Not a nice floor.
Not hardwood.
More like that suspicious linoleum in your grandmother’s basement that hasn’t been replaced since Matlock premiered.
But a floor nonetheless.
After years of watching America’s pay-TV subscriber count plummet from roughly 100 million households in 2016 to around 62 million today, analysts at MoffettNathanson now believe the decline could eventually stabilize somewhere around 50 million subscribers by 2030.
Fifty.
Million.
People.
Still paying for a bundle of television channels.
In 2030.
I read this and immediately checked the publication date to make sure Business Insider hadn’t accidentally republished something from 2007.
Nope.
So as the author of a book chronicling the decline of cable television, I have an important announcement:
I WAS RIGHT.
Mostly.
Okay, extremely right with one potentially irritating footnote.
FIRST OF ALL, LET’S ADMIRE THE CORPSE
Before the cable industry starts firing confetti cannons because somebody discovered it might still have 50 million customers four years from now, some perspective is required.
Cable/pay TV had around 100 million subscribers in 2016.
Today?
About 62 million.
The forecasted floor?
Approximately 50 million.
Imagine owning a restaurant with 100 customers.
Thirty-eight leave.
Another twelve are walking toward the door.
And your manager bursts out of the kitchen screaming:
“GOOD NEWS! WE THINK THE OTHER FIFTY ARE TRAPPED!”
That’s essentially where we are.
And yet, this is legitimately significant.
Because for years, the assumption throughout the television business has basically been:
The cord-cutting continues until somebody turns off the lights.
In fact, just two years ago, MoffettNathanson was saying there appeared to be no floor beneath cable’s decline. Now its analysis suggests there actually may be one.
Which raises an obvious question.
Who are these people?
Who survives the Great Cable Purge?
Who looks at Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount+, Apple TV, YouTube and approximately 413 other streaming services and says:
“No thanks. Where’s my package with 184 channels, including six I watch?”
The answer, apparently, is…
FOOTBALL DADS.
Sports fans.
The cockroaches of the television apocalypse.
I say that lovingly.
Because sports—particularly the NFL—remain one of the strongest reasons millions of Americans continue paying for some form of television bundle.
Even as sports migrate onto streaming platforms, a large amount of premium live sports still runs through broadcast and cable channels. The consumers who had little interest in sports were disproportionately likely to abandon pay TV earlier. What’s increasingly left is a harder core of customers who actually need what the bundle still does well.
And suddenly the future of television makes a bizarre amount of sense.
HGTV didn’t save cable.
The Weather Channel didn’t save cable.
The K1 Visa from 90 Day Fiancé didn’t save cable.
Guy Fieri didn’t save cable.
Though God knows he tried.
The thing standing between cable television and the abyss may ultimately be a 54-year-old man named Gary screaming:
“WHERE THE HELL IS THE BILLS GAME?”
THE NFL IS THE LAST HELICOPTER OUT OF SAIGON
Live sports possess something increasingly rare in entertainment:
urgency.
Nobody needs to watch episode six of The Bear at exactly 8:03 tonight.
You can watch it tomorrow.
Or Saturday.
Or three months from now when somebody at work asks whether you’ve seen it and you lie:
“I’m two episodes behind.”
Sports don’t work like that.
If your team is playing at 4:25 Sunday afternoon, you want to watch at 4:25 Sunday afternoon.
Not Monday morning.
Because by then your phone has already informed you what happened.
Your brother has texted you.
Your coworker has posted about it.
And some psychopath at the grocery store is wearing the winning team’s jersey.
The entire experience has been ruined.
Live sports remain one of television’s last remaining forms of appointment viewing.
And appointment viewing was the oxygen that powered cable television for decades.
WHICH IS VERY FUNNY, BECAUSE WE HAVE REINVENTED CABLE
This is one of the central absurdities behind Channelmania.
We spent years complaining about cable.
“Why am I paying for channels I don’t watch?”
So we destroyed the bundle.
Freedom!
Then everybody launched a streaming service.
Netflix.
Hulu.
Disney+.
HBO Max.
Peacock.
Paramount+.
Apple TV.
Prime Video.
ESPN.
Then the prices started rising.
Then advertising returned.
Then services started bundling together.
Then live channels appeared.
Then sports packages appeared.
Then streaming companies began selling bundles of streaming services.
And now services such as YouTube TV are increasingly functioning as internet-delivered versions of the traditional pay-TV bundle. MoffettNathanson’s forecast includes those virtual providers, and YouTube TV is on track to become the largest pay-TV distributor in America.
Congratulations, America.
WE KILLED CABLE AND INVENTED CABLE.
Except now it buffers.
This may be the greatest technological achievement since humanity spent 30 years replacing buttons with touchscreens and then began adding buttons back because everyone realized buttons were actually pretty useful.
THE GREAT STREAMING PROMISE
Remember what streaming was supposed to accomplish?
Cheap.
Simple.
No commercials.
Watch whatever you want.
Cancel anytime.
That was the sales pitch.
Today, watching television sometimes feels like assembling the Infinity Stones.
Thursday Night Football?
One service.
Sunday afternoon?
Something else.
Sunday night?
Another place.
Monday night?
Check ESPN.
Christmas?
Maybe Netflix.
Some playoff game you absolutely need to see?
Apparently it’s streaming exclusively on an app called Flarp+ that costs $11.99 and requires your mother’s maiden name.
Consumer Reports’ current guide to the 2026–27 NFL season says that watching all the action requires a mix of streaming services even if you already have cable television.
USA Today reached essentially the same conclusion: even cable subscribers can no longer get every NFL game through one television plan as more games become streaming exclusives.
We have achieved the impossible.
Television is simultaneously more customizable AND more confusing.
Outstanding work, everyone.
BUT HERE’S WHERE THE ARTICLE ACTUALLY CHANGED MY THINKING
I went into Channelmania looking backward.
The book is partly a celebration of the bizarre, wonderful ecosystem cable created.
Cable didn’t merely give us more television.
It changed what television was allowed to be.
MTV.
ESPN.
CNN.
Nickelodeon.
Discovery.
Comedy Central.
Food Network.
TLC.
AMC.
FX.
Adult Swim.
Networks built identities (then kept changing them: Family Channel-Fox Family-ABC Family-Freeform is just one nutty example).
They took chances.
They served niches.
They created cultural tribes.
And occasionally they aired nine consecutive hours of people buying storage lockers.
Nobody said every revolution had to be dignified.
But the conventional narrative says that era ends with streaming.
Cable rises.
Cable dominates.
Streaming arrives.
Cable dies.
Roll credits.
This new analysis suggests the ending may be stranger.
Cable doesn’t necessarily die.
It shrinks until only the people who genuinely need the bundle remain.
That’s different.
And frankly, it’s more interesting.
CABLE MAY BECOME THE COCKROACH OF MEDIA
The industry could eventually settle into something smaller but durable.
Think vinyl records.
Movie theaters.
Terrestrial radio.
Physical books.
Every new technology supposedly kills the previous technology.
Usually it doesn’t.
It just forces the old medium to figure out who still cares about it.
Vinyl didn’t need everyone.
It needed vinyl people.
Movie theaters don’t need everyone going twice a week.
They need movies compelling enough to make people leave their couches.
And perhaps pay TV doesn’t need 100 million households anymore.
Maybe it needs 50 million households that desperately value sports, news, live events and the convenience of having a bunch of channels accessible in one place.
There’s an important distinction here, however.
That doesn’t mean the traditional coaxial-cable box survives unchanged.
The category increasingly includes digital bundles such as YouTube TV.
So the ultimate survivor may not be cable technology.
It may be the cable idea.
And that is the part I didn’t fully appreciate.
THE BUNDLE WASN’T THE VILLAIN. THE PRICE WAS.
For decades we blamed the bundle.
But the bundle solved an actual problem:
Finding stuff.
Turn on TV.
Guide.
Channel.
Done.
Streaming solved another problem:
Choice.
Watch what you want whenever you want.
Wonderful.
But as streaming fragmented, choice created a new problem:
Where the hell is everything?
That’s why bundling keeps creeping back.
Consumers don’t necessarily hate bundles.
Consumers hate paying too much for bundles filled with things they don’t value.
That’s a very different problem.
And sports provides enormous perceived value for a particular group of consumers.
One 2026 survey found 36% of respondents said live sports could bring them back to cable, although that figure comes from a 1,000-person commercial survey rather than an industry-wide subscriber measurement.
That’s worth paying attention to.
SO WAS CHANNELMANIA WRONG?
Absolutely not.
Don’t be ridiculous.
I have books to sell.
The fundamental story hasn’t changed.
Cable television experienced one of the most astonishing ascents in American media history.
Then it fractured.
The monoculture disappeared.
Networks lost their identities.
Cord-cutting accelerated.
Audiences migrated.
The business model buckled.
Tens of millions of households left.
All true.
Channelmania chronicles that extraordinary rise and fall through 100 programs that helped define the medium, because cable wasn’t merely a delivery system.
It was a cultural era.
And eras can end even when the underlying technology survives.
The Roman Empire ended.
Rome is still there.
Blockbuster died.
People still watch movies.
The shopping mall declined.
Cinnabon remains undefeated.
Cable’s golden age can absolutely be over while some version of pay television continues serving 50 million American households.
Those ideas aren’t contradictory.
If anything, this new forecast gives the story one final twist.
CABLE TV’S LAST GREAT SHOW MAY BE CABLE TV
Picture the year 2030.
Netflix is showing NFL games.
Amazon has sports.
YouTube is America’s largest pay-TV provider.
Traditional cable companies sell broadband.
Streaming services bundle themselves together.
Commercials are everywhere again.
Consumers pay monthly subscription fees.
Shows release weekly.
Sports rights cost billions.
And 50 million households still subscribe to something that looks suspiciously like…
cable television.
Maybe cable didn’t lose.
Maybe it successfully infected its replacement.
And somewhere, an old Comcast cable box sitting in a landfill will smile.
Because it knew.
You always come back to the bundle.
THE CRITIC HAS SPOKEN.
In The Unknown Critic Presents: Channelmania — Cable TV’s Rise & Fall and the 100 Shows That Made the Medium, I revisit the programs, networks, personalities and magnificent televised nonsense that transformed cable from a utility into a cultural force.
The story includes triumphs.
Disasters.
Experiments.
Reinventions.
And more questionable programming decisions than should legally be allowed before midnight.
I wrote it believing cable television’s great cultural era had ended.
I still believe that.
But apparently cable itself has looked at the Grim Reaper and said:
“Hang on. The Chiefs game starts in ten minutes.”
And I respect that.
Until next time, I’ll be under the bag.