On March 2, one of the last pillars of linear TV will fall: the Academy Awards. Hollywood’s biggest night is a celebration of cinema, but this year it may as well double as a requiem for traditional TV. For the first time in the history of the broadcast, the Oscars will be streamed live outside of the pay TV ecosystem, on Disney’s Hulu, alongside its broadcast home on ABC.
In fact, 2025 is quietly shaping up to be linear TV’s last gasp, the year when the pieces that were gluing what was left of the pay-TV bundle together break free from it, and migrate toward the inevitable streaming future. Entering this year, a surprising number of events have required a pay TV subscription (or at least a streaming bundle provider like YouTube TV) to watch live. There’s the Oscars, of course, but also everything on the ESPN networks, including Monday Night Football, and the NBA Finals on ABC. Fox’s slate of college football games, Sunday NFL games and MLB playoff games haven’t been available to stream outside the pay TV bundle either.
In fact, 14 of the top 50 TV broadcasts in 2024 were exclusive to pay TV bundle services, according to data from Nielsen, all of them football games on Fox or ESPN (CBS streams its games on Paramount+, while NBC Sports events are on Peacock). The Oscars also cracked the top 100.
Come next year, that number will be 0 of 50. Every single thing on Nielsen’s most watched list will be available in a stand-alone streamer in addition to the big bundles.
To be certain, the migration to streaming has been slow and steady. Entertainment programming pivoted to on-demand streaming years ago thanks to Netflix. Disney, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount all fell in line accordingly. As Hollywood began to pour billions of dollars into streaming, cable channels became husks of their former selves. Brands like TNT and USA, which had full slates of scripted fare, shed most of that, while others like FX and Bravo became channels that doubled as genre sub-brands for Hulu and Peacock.
“We actually are at a point where the linear networks in our company are not a burden at all, they’re actually an asset,” Disney CEO Bob Iger told Wall Street analysts Feb. 5. “We are programming them and funding them at levels that actually give us the ability to enhance our overall television business, that obviously includes and leans into streaming, which, let’s face it, is really the future of the television business.”
In other words, Disney is spending substantially less on linear TV content, while still collecting what monthly fees it can.
The comments likely ring familiar to Hollywood. After all, Jeff Shell, the incoming president of Paramount (assuming the Skydance deal closes) similarly noted to press last year that his approach to CBS will be similarly grounded.
“I think if there’s going to be a change for CBS, it’s going to be that we’re going to probably manage it a bit more aggressively for cash flow, meaning making some harder decisions on time periods and things like that going forward, which you have to when you have a declining business,” Shell said. “But there’s really no change in the overall vision for the asset, other than we believe in it, it’s going to be actively part of all of our plans going forward.”
Sports and news were the last things standing in the TV bundle, though NBC, CBS and WBD have all become aggressive about streaming their live sports and events like the Grammys on their respective streaming services, and Disney has already begun to stream some live sports on Disney+ and Hulu ahead of the ESPN flagship launch. Even smaller cable channels have embraced the change, with AMC, Hallmark, Reelz and The Weather Channel either launching stand-alone services or partnering with a bigger platform for streaming. Executives, meanwhile, are pivoting to a new strategy: trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, everyone — even ESPN and Fox — is now officially all in on streaming. On the other, there is a newfound desire to try to salvage the pay TV bundle in some shape or form.
The announcement (and swift death) of the Disney, Warners and Fox sports-focused bundle Venu ended up changing the calculus of pay TV. DirecTV, Comcast and other pay TV providers are now offering skinnier bundles focused on sports and news, recognizing that entertainment content has left already but that a bundle of everything else can still provide value.
Now that pay TV will have little if any exclusive content, the floodgates will likely open to more creative bundling of channels, with providers perhaps hoping that skinnier bundles with more niche genres can be stickier for consumers and provide the value proposition that long ago left the basic bundle.
“Venu basically looked redundant to us,” Iger said, adding that Disney’s strategy is to “make ESPN available however the consumer wants it, wherever the consumer wants it.”
Fox, similarly, is adapting to Venu’s demise, recognizing that there are millions of people who don’t pay for big bundles of linear channels, and likely never will. If their content isn’t available to them outside of those packages, there is a risk of obsolescence.
“We are designing an offering to really target those cord cutters and cord-nevers that are not traditionally in the cable bundle,” Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said of the new streaming service. “We see the traditional cable bundle as still the most value for our consumers and the most value for our company. So we’re huge supporters of the traditional cable bundle, and we will always be.”
To that end, the Fox and ESPN streaming plays are likely part of a larger corporate strategy, one allowing companies to get creative with deals. “We have been skeptical of consumer appetite for a standalone sports DTC offering – and still think pricing for the current skinnier bundles are priced too high for meaningful subscriber interest,” MoffettNathanson analyst Robert Fishman wrote in a Feb. 4 note. “But Fox can now use this new DTC service as a tool for future negotiations with linear Pay TV distributors, vMVPDs and even other streaming services.”
In fact, one high-level TV industry source describes the current environment as a moment for “optionality.” With the most valuable programming about to be available outside of the traditional bundles, companies can get more creative in their dealmaking. Fox, for example, could cut a deal with Disney to include its sports in the upcoming ESPN streaming service, or as Rich Greenfield at LightShed Partners suggests, it could cut a deal with Paramount to make Paramount+ the ultimate home for Sunday afternoon football.
“What better way to reinvent Paramount+ than to substantially expand its sports content?” Greenfield wrote Feb. 7. “With $7.99 and $12.99 tiers with/without ads, adding on Fox content at an incremental $10 in a bundle or as part of a premium tier feels far more reasonable.”
And Disney, which already bundles Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Max, is already thinking about how it will bundle the upcoming ESPN flagship service.
But when ESPN and Fox officially free their content from traditional bundles, the moment will also become existential for what little is left in them.
MSNBC is not available to stream live outside of a bundle, and neither is CNN’s full lineup (some shows are available on Max). WWE Smackdown is still only available live on USA Network (Netflix streams WWE Raw and Peacock streams other WWE events), while some TNT Sports events and shows aren’t available live on Max.
And events on Paramount’s cable channels are still exclusive to the bundle, including the MTV Video Music Awards and the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. E!’s live red carpet coverage doesn’t stream, either.
It’s a dwindling list of live programming, and it will likely dwindle even further. After all, if the Oscars are streaming, why can’t the VMAs? And if Fox News can stream, why can’t MSNBC?
That will be a top priority for executives at “SpinCo” when Comcast spins out its cable channels this year, sources say, noting that free from being tied to Peacock, Mark Lazarus and his team can figure out how best to approach streaming for their brands.
The world of media has been turned upside down from 25-30 years ago, when every live event was rushing towards pay TV, knowing that essentially every household in America paid for a bundle of channels.
Now the number of pay TV subscribers is falling fast, and every piece of content that has value wants out so it can find new footing elsewhere. As one source notes of the Oscars move: The show has to be available to stream to maintain any semblance of cultural relevance in the future, and neither ABC nor the film Academy was eager to wait until their deal ends in 2028 to make that leap.
The question is whether some of what’s left on linear gets caught up in the overall cable collapse, or if they can figure out an exit strategy of their own.
This story first appeared in the Feb. 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
