Streaming Tops Traditional Cable TV Viewership For First Time Ever

The writing has been on the wall for a while, but streaming TV has finally surpassed traditional cable in terms of overall viewership numbers for the first time ever. According to viewership tracking firm Nielsen (who once upon a time called the cord cutting revolution purely fiction) streaming saw a 34.8 percent overall viewership in July compared to 34.4 percent for cable":

The shift has been an easy prediction for at least a decade, but it's finally here. After decades of being over-charged for giant bundles of expensive channels they don't watch, consumers have understandably flocked to streaming alternatives that offer greater freedom of choice for generally less money (despite the stories whining about how expensive streaming is if you subscribe to every service in existence).

The end result: July saw the highest rate of streaming content consumption on record:

In addition to claiming the largest viewership share during the month, audiences watched an average of 190.9 billion minutes of streamed content per week-easily surpassing the 169.9 billion minutes that audiences watched during the pandemic lockdown period back in April 2020. Excluding the week of Dec. 27, 2021, the five weeks of July 2022 represent the highest-volume streaming weeks on record, according to Nielsen measurement.

Data suggests that the nation's biggest cable TV providers lost nearly two million paying subscribers in the second quarter alone.

Again, I'm old enough to remember when Nielsen spent a decade pretending this shift wasn't actually happening, despite very obvious evidence that it was. Then we watched as Nielsen belatedly realized that as a video viewership tracking firm they might just want to stop telling cable TV executives (also in longstanding denial) what they wanted to hear and actually start tracking streaming viewership as well.

The trick now as the streaming industry consolidates is to avoid embracing the greed and hubris that made traditional cable TV so open to disruption in the first place.