Broadcast TV seems a little screwed. Viewership has been on a steady decline for the past two decades. More and more people get their entertainment and their news online. The biggest shows are coming to streaming first, and broadcast’s biggest shows are losing their big-name hosts. Naturally ad revenue is on a steady decline as well. Even Trump and his choice for Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, are rattling their sabers and threatening to pull the broadcast licenses of networks that run programs or news stories the White House doesn’t like.
It can feel like broadcast television will be gone tomorrow, and with it one of the only totally free sources of news and entertainment.
That’s what’s so crucial about broadcast TV. While it does require a television and a digital tuner to watch, there’s no monthly fee for internet or service, and unlike YouTube or Instagram, no company is collecting enormous amounts of data on you to sell to advertisers. It’s a completely passive experience. The stations air sports and news and entertainment, and you can tune in or not. And people are not tuning in.
“Our expectation is it’s going to decline,” says Rose Oberman, media and entertainment director at S&P Global Ratings, though she noted that decline would happen over years, not months, and likened TV’s slide to what’s happened to radio over the past couple of decades. There’s no sudden collapse in broadcast TV’s future, just a steady chipping away as audiences move from paying for cable to paying for streaming.
Take sports as an example. Events like the Olympics and the Super Bowl were once reliable audience drivers, but in 2024 the Super Bowl streamed on Paramount Plus. The experience was buggy and stuttering, but Paramount Plus still garnered 3.4 million more subscribers than it had before the game. The Olympics, which were simulcast on Peacock, experienced even more online success. People liked that they could just watch the events they wanted on demand and skip anything they didn’t.
Then, at Christmas, sports streaming experienced its biggest event to date when Netflix successfully streamed two NFL games (and a flashy Beyoncé-starring half-time show). Nary a complaint of stuttering in sight. Afterward, Netflix claimed they were the most streamed games in NFL history.
Streaming’s big sports win won’t immediately snuff out sports on broadcast TV—there are contracts in place keeping live games on the air. Yet as those contracts come up for renewal, leagues may opt to take their games elsewhere, particularly as broadcast becomes less profitable and viewers switch to streaming. Right now the networks spend billions to air NFL games, but companies like Netflix and Amazon have deeper pockets, and they’ve shown they have no problem paying big money to snatch rights out from under legacy media networks. Amazon agreed to pay $1 billion a year to secure the rights to NFL Thursday Night Football back in 2021. Fox was previously paying about $660 million annually for those games.
The belt-tightening has already hit another big money driver of network TV: the morning show. In early January, Hoda Kotb left the Today show after 17 years. The broadcast journalist was reportedly making more than $20 million a year as a host, and NBC just didn’t want to keep paying that. That’s also why the network axed the band on Late Night With Seth Meyers and dropped the number of weekly episodes of The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon from five to four. They’re all signs of what Variety called “TV’s new austerity push.”
“We do have audiences going to different places to watch their programming,” one agent told Variety. “A number of these entities are seeing their revenues decline. That’s just a fact of life.”
But with broadcast TV’s audience now fractured across streaming, cable, and social media, why is Donald Trump threatening its existence? “This is a political cudgel being used against national news networks,” says David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Greene noted that Trump’s ire was focused more on national news outlets than the local stations that actually possess the broadcast licenses.
Some networks do own local stations. Paramount, which also produces CBS’s 60 Minutes, owns a handful, and was even exploring selling 12 of them back in August before Trump lobbed his latest threats toward the network. But when I asked Oberman about those threats, she said she hadn’t “really heard it was an area of concern” for the industry. “If anything the incoming administration is more pro-friendly to the broadcasters.”
Perry Sook, the CEO of Nexstar, the largest television station owner in the US, is hopeful that the new administration will remove rules capping the number of local stations a company can own. On a November 2024 earnings call, Sook clearly stated what kind of journalism he’d like to see on those stations. “[I]t seems as though there may be a kinder, gentler consensus emerging, that maybe fact-based journalism will come back into vogue, as well as eliminating the level of activist journalism out there,” he said on the call.
Sinclair, the second largest owner of TV stations in the US, is also eager for more consolidation, and has gained a reputation for directing its local stations to cover the news with a POV more in line with Sinclair’s own conservative political leanings. Sinclair was the subject of a 2018 viral video that showed dozens of newscasters from across the US reading the exact same script criticizing the media that repeated common conservative talking points.
But the Trump administration and the big owners of broadcast licenses aren’t just friendly because of their shared political leanings. According to Orman, local stations also tend to have better reach when it comes to political advertising. “Digital doesn’t seem to be giving political advertisers the return they’re expecting, and TV still seems to give that,” Orman told Ad Exchanger late last year. Broadcast TV actually saw its ad revenue increase by 9 percent in 2024, an uptick due entirely to increased spending on political ads during the major election cycle.
With the election in the rearview, that ad money is drying up. And with viewership fading and streaming outspending the networks hand over fist, one of the world’s oldest media institutions has its back against the wall. Even if the incoming administration fails to make good on its promise to punish media outlets that run stories it finds offensive, broadcast TV is entering a period of existential uncertainty.
“Broadcast is so vulnerable right now,” says the EFF’s Greene, “any threat against it seems to be a danger.”