As Ratings Fade, Can Live TV News Reinvent Itself for the Streaming Era?

CNN’s CEO was shoved out the door today. After a series of audience-alienating moves, Chris Licht adds his name to the long list of executives who failed to pivot their news companies to become sustainable businesses. But the story is larger than one man. The journalism industry as a whole appears to be teetering on the brink of collapse. We have some ideas to fix it.

Unstoppable Linear Decay

In 2022, pay TV providers lost 5.8 million subscribers, and that number only seems to be accelerating. As cable sheds subscribers, streaming services seem to be the beneficiaries. Although growth has slowed with increased competition and the pressures of inflation, streaming is still on an upward trajectory.

Audiences are also flocking to the many useful free services. After all, if you want to watch reruns of “Hell’s Kitchen,” you have at least 10 options and you don’t have to pay anything.

As we look at the bloated channel lineups across most cable and live TV streamers, most of us only watch a handful of networks. With the best comedies, dramas, and reruns available on streaming services, the only reason to stay subscribed to a linear provider is to watch live events.

A recent survey suggests nearly half of all cable subscribers would abandon their provider if there were a way to stream live events. Sports is the biggest driver of live TV viewership. Of the 100 most-watched programs of 2022, 94 were sporting events.

Sports leagues risk alienating audiences as broadcast rights are divvied up across multiple services. Baseball fans have it especially rough as a rat’s nest of RSNs, cable channels, and streamers carry the games. This upcoming NFL season will require a live TV provider, Prime Video, Peacock, and ESPN+ if you’d like to see all the games.

If sports ever jumped off linear TV entirely, the entire ecosystem would crumble. But in comparison to sports, news viewership is barely a blip. We can expect ratings to increase in 2024 with another presidential election, but news and sports are different animals dependent on the same dying TV ecosystem.

Putting the ‘Broad’ Back in ‘Broadcasting’

In the face of eroding linear viewership, is streaming the answer for news stations?

Remember that CNN+ was a flat disaster that lasted less than a month. A standalone SVOD news service can’t be profitable enough to function.

Maybe it makes more sense to add news to a general entertainment streamer. Axios reports that CNN executives want to find a way to add some of the network’s content to Max without violating any distribution contracts with cable carriers.

Even if all of CNN jumped to Max, that wouldn’t help Max viewers who don’t like the way CNN covers news.

The solution we propose would require something that’s become uncommon in the streaming wars: cooperation.

As the linear model erodes, news stations should shift their budgets to streaming-native versions accordingly. Then, the stations should make their content available to any streamer that wants them: Netflix, Max, Pluto TV, Tubi, Paramount+, you name it. As a public good, you should be able to access these news stations anywhere. You’d still have commercials, with the revenue split between the streamer and the news network.

This still doesn’t solve the problem of “carriage fees” currently paid by cable companies to the networks. Perhaps the ability to access a news tier requires a slightly higher subscription fee from the viewer. Admittedly, the economics may be difficult to sort out.

Changing the Tone

Absent a cataclysmic story, news viewership is minimal. This explains why so many 24/7 channels try to gin up scandal and controversy - in the absence of catastrophe, covering everything like catastrophe seems like a good way to reel in viewers. That’s a self-inflicted wound on the part of news stations, and one unlikely to change without courage.

Too many networks are reliant on reading a tweet or playing a soundbite and then having a panel of talking heads debating the quote for 30 minutes. That has to stop. It’s not news - it’s opinion. It’s also cheaper than sending out a news crew to cover a story. But if news networks want to be more relevant and useful, they’ll have to meet the viewers where they are.

TV news must relay the events that occur and provide context for the viewer. It must be accurate and call out inaccuracies. A viewer needs to walk away from a newscast feeling more informed. Too often, we turn off the news feeling exhausted at having been yelled at for 60 minutes.

Most of these networks have local affiliates that work hard, covering the stories in their communities. Too often, the national networks only cover news from Washington or New York, leaving most of the country feeling unseen and unheard. A better model harnesses the affiliates to share a more complete vision of the country. Just as a country’s problems cannot be solved by the election of one president, a national newscast cannot be useful unless it covers stories from across the nation. Sixty seconds of mass shooting coverage doesn’t count as covering a community.

If newscasts can return to their truth-telling roots, adopt a more widespread distribution strategy, and find ways to connect with the audience, there is hope for a renewed future. The days of screaming on cable TV are drawing to an end. It’s time to evolve.