As I stream my comfort shows across an array of platforms, it feels like my cable subscription only survives for three specific reasons: to watch the Rays locally in the Tampa Bay area, to catch 1AM insomnia-fuelled reruns of America Says on the Game Show Network, and to see whatever antics Becky Lynch gets into that week on the USA Network. Despite cable’s decades-long stranglehold on American television, the rise of cord-cutting and the ongoing debate of streaming vs cable has reshaped viewing habits. Streaming demand is higher than ever, while the people who continue to pay for cable seem to do so for the same narrow reasons I do.
There are countless reasons why both cable and broadcast television now find themselves behind the 8-ball, struggling to adapt to a changing market. Yet as mainstream TV tries to evolve, its supposed replacement — streaming — is already hitting walls of its own. On Twitter, Reddit, and across online discourse, you’ll see the same claim repeated: streaming is “becoming cable again,” a full-circle moment in American consumerism.
But that argument oversimplifies the reality of streaming vs cable. Even with consolidation, ad-tiers, and high-profile cancellations, the debate is rarely nuanced. Too often, the conversation reduces everything to price — and even then, does so incorrectly. The truth is that both cable and streaming carry serious problems heading into 2025, but their problems are entirely different.
From Broadcast Giants to Cable Dominance
The highest-rated show on television in 1960 was Gunsmoke, airing on broadcast TV in an era when only around 45 million households even owned a television. By the early 1970s, Norman Lear’s groundbreaking All in the Family became the #1 show for six consecutive seasons (1971–1976), dominating CBS primetime. By 1976, when an estimated 90% of American households had a television, the launch of the WTBS Superstation changed the media landscape forever. WTBS (now TBS) was the first true cable giant, driven in part by Warner’s acquisition of the Atlanta Braves. By the 1980s, cable had overtaken broadcast as the default choice, with around 53 million households subscribing by the decade’s end. Yet after decades of dominance, the broadcast-and-cable model is now struggling to stay relevant in the streaming vs cable era.
Modern Ratings Collapse
Fast forward to the 2020s, and the ratings picture looks unrecognisable. In 2025, the highest-rated scripted show on CBS is still Ghosts, a Rose McIver-led sitcom averaging just under nine million viewers — a number that pales compared to the heyday of Gunsmoke or All in the Family. The only consistent juggernaut across broadcast remains Sunday Night Football on NBC, which continues its run as America’s #1 primetime program. The message is clear: in a world of endless content, the only “must-watch live” programming left on cable or broadcast is sports. Viewers would rather watch Micah Parsons wreck quarterbacks or Antoine Winfield Jr. shut down passing attacks than sit down for the latest family sitcom.
This explains why sports rights — the NFL on NBC, the NBA on TNT, the NHL on ESPN — are the crown jewels keeping cable alive. Even AEW (All Elite Wrestling), Tony Khan’s young pro-wrestling promotion, consistently ranks in the top three cable shows on Wednesday nights despite regularly drawing fewer than a million live viewers. That would have been considered a failure in cable’s golden era, but in the 2025 streaming vs cable landscape, it’s a win.
The Rise (and Limits) of Sports-Driven Cable
Cable’s biggest draw remains sports. ESPN thrives off the NHL, NBA, and NFL highlights, while TNT leans on the NBA and its wildly popular Inside the NBA panel. Yet streaming platforms are muscling into this once-protected turf. Amazon Prime carries Thursday Night Football; Peacock now streams select exclusive NFL games; and MAX has invested in live U.S. Soccer coverage. Still, frustrating blackout restrictions remain, designed to protect local cable affiliates — a reminder that streaming is still chained to cable’s survival. Regional sports networks, once the backbone of cable bundles, are crumbling, with Sinclair’s bankruptcy highlighting just how fragile the model is.
Syndication: From Golden Goose to Diminishing Returns
Cable’s old business model was built on syndication. Traditionally, shows needed around 88–100 episodes (four to five seasons) before they could be sold into stripped syndication. But in 2025, that model carries little weight. Classic examples like Seinfeld, Friends, and The Office remain lucrative — Seinfeld famously fetched a $500 million streaming deal with Netflix — but their success has more to do with streaming rights than cable reruns. Shows that once thrived in cable syndication, like The Jetsons (75 episodes) or Arrested Development (84 episodes), now generate far more cultural relevance when rediscovered on streaming platforms.
Consumers know this too. The cheapest Spectrum cable package starts at $60 per month before taxes — more than the combined monthly price of Netflix, Peacock, MAX, and Disney+ at their ad-supported tiers. In the streaming vs cable debate, cost is often cited as the biggest factor. But in reality, younger viewers only use cable for live sports, while older viewers split along political lines: CNN’s Anderson Cooper for liberals, Fox News’ Jesse Watters for conservatives. If you don’t care about sports or politics, cable has almost nothing left to offer.
The Streaming Advantage
For the same price, streaming consumers enjoy near-unlimited choice. Instead of paying for 150 channels and only watching five, streaming allows cherry-picking: you pay for what you actually want. Better still, you can select exactly which episode you want, at any time, without ads (assuming you pay for the premium tier). Nostalgia is easier too. If you suddenly want to dive into King of Queens after seeing a viral Doug Heffernan meme, cable forces you to tune into whatever syndicated episode is airing at 11pm on TVLand. On Peacock, you can start at the pilot — Jerry Stiller burning down his house — and binge straight through.
Even more, algorithms keep the cycle going. After King of Queens, Peacock can automatically recommend Everybody Loves Raymond, a crossover-rich companion sitcom. Cable can’t replicate that. It’s a striking example of how streaming provides a tailored, consumer-first experience, while cable still forces you to adapt to its rigid schedule.
Cable’s Attempts to Compete
Cable has tried to copy streaming’s model by offering add-on “premium” channels with exclusive content. AT&T’s Audience Network once produced originals like Mr. Mercedes. HBO became legendary in this space, producing hits like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, The Larry Sanders Show, and The West Wing. But by 2025, even HBO is part of streaming, folded into Warner’s MAX. The streaming vs cable battleground has shifted: cable now exists mainly as a delivery system for sports and news, while streaming dominates scripted entertainment.
Consolidation and the Shaky Future of Streaming
As Viacom prepares to fully consolidate Paramount+ with Showtime in 2025, the move underscores a bleaker future for the once “innovative” world of streaming. What was once a competitive space with endless promise is now marked by instability. In the ever-growing streaming vs cable battle, even streaming giants are struggling to keep revenue sustainable. The early 2020s saw a “bubble effect” as every studio and niche company launched their own platform, creating a glut of content that far outpaced demand. Now, the market is correcting.
We’ve already seen consolidation across niche services: the WWE Network folded into Peacock, Studio Ghibli’s library landed on MAX, and Funimation merged with Crunchyroll. Bigger companies are taking similar steps. WarnerMedia combined HBO Max and Discovery+ into MAX. Disney has officially merged Disney+ with Hulu in 2025, rolling out a unified app after beta testing throughout 2024. Already, new flagship content like Percy Jackson and the Olympians is streaming across the combined platform, with stars Leah Jeffries, Walker Scobell, Adam Copeland, and the late Lance Reddick drawing audiences from both legacy services.
These mergers are framed as consumer-friendly, but in reality they reveal the fragility of the streaming vs cable model. Cable once thrived on bundling — offering hundreds of channels regardless of consumer demand. Streaming initially promised the opposite: freedom, choice, à la carte programming. Yet as more platforms merge, the landscape increasingly resembles the very cable model it once sought to disrupt.
Nostalgia, Rediscovery, and the Suits Phenomenon
I’m writing this with the SyFy original 12 Monkeys playing in the background on Hulu — a series I never caught during its live run, only discovering it years later during the COVID-19 pandemic. This, more than flashy new originals, is the quiet power of streaming: rediscovery. And I’m hardly alone. The biggest streaming story of 2023 wasn’t a shiny new blockbuster, but Suits — a USA Network drama that ended before the pandemic yet became the most-watched show in Netflix’s history.
The numbers were staggering: Suits broke records for total minutes watched across a summer and held the #1 spot worldwide for weeks on end, per Nielsen. That’s despite not even having its full run on Netflix (with some seasons exclusive to Peacock). It consistently outperformed high-budget, star-studded originals designed to be “Netflix tentpoles.”
Why? Analysts point to three key factors. First, Netflix’s Meghan Markle documentary shined a new spotlight on her role as Rachel Zane in Suits. Second, the 2023 writers’ strike limited the release of competing new content. Third — and most importantly — nostalgia. Audiences gravitated to a familiar, episodic legal drama that reminded them of “old-school” TV viewing.
This last point is crucial. Streaming platforms once sold themselves on binge culture — dropping entire seasons at once. But Suits proved that audiences don’t necessarily want endless binges. Sometimes they crave the rhythm of weekly viewing, the watercooler conversations, and the chance to let characters breathe. It’s a reminder that the streaming vs cable conversation isn’t just about cost or convenience. It’s about how people want to experience television.
Binge Culture, Retention, and the Struggle for Staying Power
Stranger Things remains Netflix’s crown jewel. Yet its success highlights a key challenge in today’s market: subscriber churn. According to Antenna’s research, many of the record-setting viewers who tuned in during 2022 cancelled Netflix soon after finishing the series. In other words, subscribers sign up for a week, binge the show, and leave. For investors, this undermines stability. For Netflix and its rivals, it has forced a fundamental shift in how content is produced, marketed, and released.
Keeping audiences watching is now the top priority. In the cable era, television could afford to be disposable. You could jump into a random Friends episode halfway through season seven — say, Joey, Rachel, and Chandler eating stolen cheesecake off the floor — and still find it funny without any real backstory. That “mindless enjoyment” era is gone. Today, shows must hook viewers immediately, and platforms must keep feeding new content through algorithms to prevent churn. It’s one of the clearest distinctions in the streaming vs cable debate: cable once thrived on passive, syndicated reruns, while streaming thrives on active retention strategies.
The Cancellation Conundrum
This reality explains why so many streaming shows vanish after a season or two. If a series doesn’t hit the heights of Orange Is the New Black in the mid-2010s or Stranger Things later that decade, platforms typically choose between two unappealing options: cancel the show outright and greenlight something new, or continue production for another season just to use it as a tax write-off. Neither is consumer-friendly, and both underscore how precarious success is in the streaming economy.
Contrast this with the height of cable television. At its peak, 20 to 30 shows regularly pulled tens of millions of live viewers in any given season, even before factoring in VCR recordings. They weren’t all mega-hits, but the shared “water cooler” effect gave networks more breathing room. Today, algorithms have splintered audiences into niche groups. From a viewer’s perspective, this hyper-tailored model is great. But from a marketing standpoint, it’s a nightmare — it’s nearly impossible to create a universal blockbuster when audiences are divided across infinite options.
The Decline of the Mainstream Audience
The idea of a mainstream audience has been eroding for years. In 2025, it’s nearly extinct. Channel surfing is gone. Primetime dominance is gone. Instead, the industry leans on established franchises that guarantee a built-in base.
Disney+ is the clearest example. Its strategy revolves almost entirely around Star Wars and Marvel. That has ensured retention, but not without drawbacks. Surprisingly, some of Disney+’s most-watched titles upon launch weren’t flashy new originals but older library content: Gargoyles, Kim Possible, Oliver and Company, even The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Disney leaned into these rediscoveries, using them for nostalgia-driven marketing campaigns. Still, their flagship originals remain The Mandalorian and WandaVision — shows with sharp drop-offs in engagement after initial seasons.
Take The Mandalorian: viewership plummeted from season two to three, partly because fans needed to watch The Book of Boba Fett to fully grasp the story of Din Djarin and Grogu. Similarly, Marvel shows connected to WandaVision alienated casual viewers who didn’t have the time or patience to follow every series in the sprawling universe. This approach is unsustainable. Expecting audiences to commit to multiple shows just to follow one storyline ignores the reality of limited time and oversaturation. And in the ever-sharpening streaming vs cable competition, that could prove to be a costly miscalculation.
Spinoffs, Binge Culture, and the Cost of Prestige
Television history is full of spinoffs. Norman Lear’s All in the Family famously spawned Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Archie Bunker’s Place, and more — most of them finding their own success. Even Happy Days birthed Laverne and Shirley, though Penny Marshall’s Laverne DeFazio only appeared in a handful of Happy Days episodes before carrying her own show. These spinoffs didn’t require encyclopedic knowledge of their parent series — they stood alone, broadening TV’s landscape.
By contrast, streaming platforms in 2025 often treat spinoffs differently. Netflix, for instance, greenlit That ‘90s Show in 2023 as a continuation of That ‘70s Show. They’ve also begun developing spinoffs of Wednesday and Peaky Blinders. The question is whether they’ll adopt Disney’s approach: requiring audiences to watch multiple shows just to follow one storyline. For Peaky Blinders, which wrapped in 2022, that won’t be much of a problem. But with Wednesday, whose second season begins filming in 2024, Netflix may test whether audiences are willing to juggle both a flagship and spinoff simultaneously. It’s here that the streaming vs cable comparison grows stark — cable spinoffs traditionally worked as standalone experiences, while streaming risks burying fans under homework.
Prestige TV and the Missing Sitcom
The other looming issue isn’t just volume of shows, but what kind of shows streaming platforms prioritize. Increasingly, streaming has adopted the “eight-hour movie” model: sprawling narratives, Hollywood budgets, and A-list casts. The Last of Us, one of HBO’s biggest 2023 hits, cost roughly $12 million per episode. Prestige television like this can attract buzz, but it doesn’t always create the long-tail value cable once enjoyed through syndication.
What’s lost in the shuffle are the accessible, low-stakes sitcoms and “time killers” that defined TV for decades. Shows like Friends didn’t dominate because they were mindless — they thrived because they were easy to watch. You could jump into any random episode without needing to know Joey’s full backstory to laugh at cheesecake eaten off the floor. That kind of drop-in accessibility was a key strength of cable syndication, and it highlights another wrinkle in the streaming vs cable debate.
Friends, still the most lucrative syndicated show ever, has made billions since hitting syndication in 1998. It remains a powerhouse across TBS, Nick at Nite, and streaming platforms. Its staying power is precisely what binge-designed shows like The Last of Us can’t replicate. Drop into a random midseason episode of The Last of Us and you’d likely be lost without prior context. Earlier serialized shows like Prison Break or Supernatural balanced this problem with recap segments, but streaming dramas often skip that entirely, assuming binge habits.
The Bubble of Big-Budget Streaming
Here lies the financial tightrope. A prestige show like The Last of Us costs tens of millions to make, yet unlike sitcoms, it may never generate the syndication money that kept cable networks profitable for decades. Instead, streaming originals are designed almost exclusively to attract and retain subscribers. The gamble is enormous: there are only so many subscriptions to go around, and one flop can destabilize an entire content slate.
The cable model had its flaws, but syndication provided stability — reruns kept delivering returns long after a show wrapped. Streaming services, however, chase massive up-front costs with uncertain payoffs. It’s a bubble that feels closer to bursting with each new big-budget series that fails to achieve cultural ubiquity. And while streaming vs cable comparisons usually focus on cost for consumers, this economic imbalance may ultimately define the future of the industry.
The Cost of Prestige and the Cancellation Crisis
One of the most frustrating aspects of the streaming boom is how every show now comes with a marquee budget. Studios believe today’s viewers demand “production value,” so series can’t look cheap. Instead of being forced to get creative within financial limits, platforms simply throw money at a problem. That inflates expectations — and shortens patience.
In the cable era, shows often had at least three seasons to find their footing. On streaming, if a show doesn’t immediately take off, executives are quick to cancel or even remove it entirely. That creates a dangerous cycle: viewers lose faith that their favourite shows will survive, and many now wait until a series is finished before committing. The result is a fractured trust in the system.
Vanishing Shows and the Ownership Problem
The cancellations sting, but what makes things worse is when series disappear altogether. Starz recently axed Shining Vale, the Courteney Cox-led horror comedy, and removed it from its own platform. This isn’t rare. Platforms increasingly choose to delete shows they own rather than pay storage and residual costs.
In the streaming vs cable debate, this highlights a massive shift in consumer rights. With cable, reruns might disappear from primetime, but syndication or DVD sales often ensured long-term access. Today, with physical media releases dwindling, fans risk losing shows forever. A cult favourite can be erased overnight because a balance sheet demanded it. Discovery is supposed to be a strength of streaming — finding hidden gems long after they air — but in reality, the impermanence of digital platforms is undermining that promise.
Streaming Should Be Winning Easily
It’s frustrating because, on paper, streaming should be demolishing cable. The advantages are obvious:
- Fewer or no ads
- Flexible viewing on any device
- Vastly larger content libraries
- The ability to choose what and when to watch
For a television fanatic, it’s paradise. Cable simply can’t compete with that level of freedom. Yet fatigue has set in.
Every studio now runs its own service. Prices climb year after year, driven not by production costs alone but by overinflated stock expectations. Algorithms frustrate users by burying content. Budgets balloon unsustainably. And the business model, increasingly, feels like a bubble waiting to burst.
Amazon Prime Video remains the exception, rarely under financial strain — but only because its streaming division is bolstered by Amazon’s retail empire. Even then, the company has added an ad-supported tier, and its long-term commitment to prestige originals is unclear.
Consolidation: A Fix or Another Problem?
Consolidation has already reshaped the landscape — Disney merging Hulu into Disney+, Warner folding Discovery+ into MAX, and Paramount+ consuming Showtime. These moves may cut costs, but they also reduce competition and limit variety. As companies scramble to satisfy shareholders, streaming risks drifting closer to the very model it was supposed to replace. And that’s the uncomfortable reality at the core of the streaming vs cable argument: neither side is truly solving consumer frustrations.
Streaming vs Cable: Where Things Stand in 2025
The services today really do offer something for everyone. No one ever watched every single channel they paid for with cable, so it feels misguided to bash streaming for that same reason. Still, the modern issue is different: subscribers jumping from one service to another, binging a single show, and cancelling immediately afterward. That churn creates an awful customer retention rate — a nightmare for executives trying to maintain shareholder confidence in an already unstable model.
But the constant claim on social media that we’re simply “returning to cable” is objectively false. If anything, entertainment has gotten cheaper. For heavy television watchers, the difference may feel negligible, but for budget-conscious viewers, the choice is clear: Netflix, MAX, Disney+, and Peacock together cost less than $60 a month before taxes. At its peak, cable charged more than that just for a base package, not including DVRs or extra boxes — and without giving viewers the freedom to decide what, when, and how they watch. In the streaming vs cable comparison, cost remains one of streaming’s clearest advantages.
Live television will always exist in some form, especially on free broadcast networks, but cable doesn’t have the same security. Its future is tethered almost entirely to live sports. Even that is eroding. Sinclair’s 2023 bankruptcy obliterated regional sports networks, leaving MLB teams like the Padres to pivot entirely to MLB.tv. That trend is spreading as more franchises transition to league-produced streaming options, cutting cable out of the equation.
Despite this, cable isn’t dead. There are still millions of subscribers — far more than people assume — and there will always be an audience for live programming that requires no effort to find. But cable’s long-term survival may depend on acquisition by tech giants like Amazon or Apple, who could use cable infrastructure to prop up their broader streaming ecosystems. We’ve already seen Disney experiment with this hybrid model by airing Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building on ABC, exposing broadcast viewers to a streaming-exclusive hit.
The other lifeline for traditional TV is live formatting beyond sports. Reality competitions like The Masked Singer and The Voice thrive because they demand immediate viewing. Miss an episode, and social media spoils it instantly. Compared to prestige dramas, these live shows are cheaper to produce, faster to market, and harder to replace with on-demand alternatives.
Heading into 2025, television sits at a crossroads. For viewers, this is an unprecedented golden age of choice: thousands of shows, films, and live events are available at your fingertips, anytime, anywhere. For studios, the picture is less rosy. The streaming vs cable war has left both sides with fractured identities — cable relying almost entirely on sports and news, streaming grappling with unsustainable budgets and customer churn. Decisions made in the next few years will determine whether this era of abundance stabilises into something sustainable or collapses into a new form of bundled monotony.
For now, the best thing we can do is enjoy the sheer volume of high-quality content available — because whether through streaming or cable, the television industry is still trying to figure out what comes next.
