The Future of Television

Is there one?

Photo by Dave Weatherall on Unsplash

As an Elder Millennial, I can just barely remember the television in our family living room from when I was a child, the one where you had to get up off the couch and walk over to the box to turn a knob when you wanted to change the channel or adjust the volume. I also remember certain seminal cultural events that we watched together on TV. I’m going to show my age (young to some readers and old to others) by saying that one of the first things I remember watching as a family was the 1988 American League Championship Series between the Oakland A’s and the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox were swept, but what I remember most was the intensity of Oakland pitcher Dave Stewart. Even through the television screen, he seemed terrifying.

I remember watching a lot of PBS growing up, too, including the usual shows like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, but also deeper cuts like 3-2-1 Contact and Square One. I remember watching Family Feud when the network interrupted the broadcast to announce that Operation Desert Storm had begun in Iraq. I was amazed (and maybe slightly nervous) at the green night-vision images of missiles and air defenses crossing the sky.

Later in the 1990s, I of course remember “Must See TV.” I can still almost recite NBC’s entire Thursday-night lineup, including Friends, Seinfeld, and Frasier. I can vividly remember O.J. Simpson and the white Ford Bronco. I remember presidential debates, Super Bowls, storm coverage, and television finales that seemed to be watched by nearly everyone.

Even as a child, you felt as though you were part of a larger togetherness surrounding these events. It was a kind of monoculture, in which Americans were brought together around their television sets not only with their families and friends, but as part of a vast network of viewers across the country, all tuned in at the same time to watch the same thing. The next morning, people talked about what they had watched. You could reasonably assume that a meaningful percentage of the people around you had seen the same program, heard the same news, or watched the same game. Such is not the case today (other than sports…more on that below).

The Last Great Television Product

There has been plenty written about how the decline of television news has shaped (or perhaps de-shaped) our civic understanding of political and societal events. There is no Walter Cronkite today to tell Americans how it is. Although, as my friend and fellow Substacker Michael Socolow would point out, television news has been and remains one of the most profitable programs the traditional networks produce. Even today, there is still a large enough audience and sufficient public interest in the news to keep the product alive.

Even so, longstanding premium news brands have found themselves in turmoil. 60 Minutes, once the most stable and prestigious institution in American television journalism, has recently experienced its own internal upheaval. Socolow, who is a media historian and journalism professor at the University of Maine, predicted on X this week that 60 Minutes ratings will decline this fall and that the greatest beneficiary of the changes at 60 Minutes may be the competing product in the same Sunday-evening time period: NBC’s Sunday Night Football.

Professional sports remains the one category capable of reliably bringing millions of Americans (and, in the case of events like the World Cup, billions of people around the globe) back to a shared live broadcast. That is why the rights to broadcast sports have become so extraordinarily expensive. The NFL’s core national media agreements are worth roughly $10 billion per year, divided among the different networks and streaming services. Amazon alone pays approximately $1 billion annually for Thursday Night Football. The current agreements run through the 2033 season. As I wrote about recently here, that is one of the main reasons (other than prestige) why professional sports teams have become so valuable; it’s because the owners are all getting a piece of these lucrative TV contracts.

The NBA’s latest package of agreements with Disney, NBCUniversal, and Amazon is reportedly worth approximately $76 billion over eleven years. The 2026 FIFA World Cup was also an enormous commercial event for its American broadcasters, with Fox and Telemundo having paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the rights, but then generating hundreds of millions of dollars more in advertising revenues.

People may be shocked by these figures, but Americans love sports. So does the rest of the world. Networks, streaming companies, and their advertisers desperately want access to those audiences. And just as importantly, there are fewer and fewer monoculture-style events left on television. Sports are virtually the only game in town for broadcasters hoping to assemble a huge audience at a specific hour on a specific night so that they can then sell ads to companies trying to reach that mega-audience. That scarcity makes sports even more valuable.

And yet even in the sports world, there is a bifurcation at play, a splitting of the audience that is reflective of this changing media landscape, not just away from network TV, but away from TVs altogether.

What Changed?

To watch every NFL game during the upcoming 2026 season, a viewer would need access to CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, ESPN, Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, the NFL Network, and Netflix of all things, which now has the exclusive rights to Christmas games, a Week 1 international game in Australia, and a new Thanksgiving Eve game. (Just as a quick aside, I am a huge NFL fan, and it’s getting to be too much. I don’t want to have NFL games five nights a week. Part of the fun of football is that it was previously consolidated into Sunday and Mondays, but now Thursday Night Football is a regular thing and the NFL has added in Thanksgiving Eve and Black Friday games. Give us a break! I would say the NFL risks oversaturating its product, but professional football in America is as popular as ever, so who knows).

My gripes about football inundation aside, it’s fair to say that more competition in the television arena has been good for consumers in many respects. It has certainly made television more interesting. There are hundreds of viewing options today, whereas when many of us were growing up there were barely five options, which was just the traditional big network broadcasters of NBC, CBS, ABC, and eventually FOX. The television viewer of 40+ years ago could only dream of the choices available today.

The Television Is Now a Computer

I would submit to you that something has been lost in the ubiquitousness of TV options. We have gained nearly unlimited choices, but we have lost the experience of watching together. And the experience is different now, too. Cable television expanded the number of available channels. Digital cable expanded it further. The internet made it possible to deliver video without a traditional broadcast tower or cable connection. Broadband speeds increased. And what happened is that smart televisions, Roku devices, Apple TVs, Amazon Fire Sticks, smartphones, and tablets turned nearly every screen into a television. I suspect that for many kids today, the idea of a “television channel” is as foreign to them as a home phone line or a “computer room,” which was another relic of our family household growing up.

For all the talk about Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and all the others, YouTube may be the most consequential of them all. For an increasing number of people, particularly younger people, YouTube has effectively replaced television. It provides entertainment, news, education, music, sports highlights, political commentary, podcasts, product reviews, exercise videos, documentaries, and nearly everything else that television once provided. I have been shocked observing my own kids as they grow up how their interest is never for Spectrum TV. Not in a hundred years would they ask to turn the TV on to watch a traditional cable station. What they do ask for (incessantly) is to watch YouTube, and occasionally Disney+ or Netflix.

There are huge differences here in television habits today versus even 15-20 years ago let along 30-40+ years ago. Viewers today do not have to select from a predetermined schedule (other than for live sports or breaking news, but even breaking news is more typically consumed by young people on social media than on a traditional television). People can watch precisely what they want, precisely when they want it, for precisely as long as they want to watch it. More people watch YouTube than any other individual media distributor, certainly more than the traditional TV networks. And people aren’t watching it on your typical grandmother’s television set.

Separate Worlds

The fragmentation of entertainment may seem to be mostly harmless. One person watches a British murder mystery, another watches Project Runway, and someone else watches a forty-minute YouTube episode of trick shots or practical jokes. The problem, as I see it, is the separateness of it all. At any given moment, each member of a household may be watching “TV,” but one person is watching it on their phone, another on a TV in their bedroom, another in the living room, and another on a tablet. Something certainly is lost there.

The fragmentation of news is consequential in its own way. The monoculture of the network-news era had plenty of shortcomings. A small number of executives and anchors exercised enormous control over which stories Americans saw and how those stories were presented. The old system should not be remembered as perfectly objective, comprehensive, or democratic, but it did give Americans something resembling a shared starting point.

Today, audiences have decamped into separate informational worlds. One person’s understanding of the news may come from Fox News. Another’s may come from MSNBC. Someone else listens to podcasts. Another person gets information from TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, X, or a Substack newsletter written from a couch in Bangor, Maine.

A majority of American adults now say they receive at least a portion of their news through social media. The algorithms behind those platforms become individual assignment editors, deciding which stories, videos, and opinions each person is most likely to click on. That means two neighbors can live on the same street, send their children to the same school, and vote in the same municipal election while experiencing almost entirely different versions of national and local events. It is not merely that people disagree about the meaning of the news. Increasingly, they are not even being shown the same news.

I’ve shared this quote before from former New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” I love the quote, but I’m not so sure about the question of facts today, as people are being spoon-fed entirely different realities by those who show up in their social media fees. People see facts entirely differently from one another. The common foundation of understanding between us has been significantly weakened.

What Comes Next

Technology has not only expanded our choices, it has changed our expectations and, perhaps, our brains. There is significant evidence out there that our attention spans are getting shorter, particularly in young people just coming of age, who have lived their entire lives in a bombardment of online stimulation.

I cannot honestly tell you the last time I watched traditional network television for anything other than sports. I do also like to turn on the local news from time to time, which I have a real fondness for. Occasionally, under random circumstances, I will turn on SportsCenter, but even that is obviously sports-related. Sometimes I will watch Saturday Night Live, often when I am buttoning up the final paragraphs on these articles. When I do, the thing that stands out to me is just how many commercial breaks there are during a Sportscenter or SNL broadcast. The experience now feels almost comically slow. The hosts discuss one subject, there is a short set of clips or a skit, they tease what is coming next, and then disappear for several minutes of commercials. By the time the program returns, I may have checked my email, read two news stories, watched a video on my phone, and forgotten what SportsCenter had promised to show me, if I ever have the TV still on to begin with.

I grew up with commercial breaks (“After these messages, we’ll be riiiight back!). I remember when the commercials were unavoidable unless you left the room to get a snack. Younger viewers have grown up in a completely different environment. They can skip, scroll, swipe, pause, accelerate, or abandon almost anything the instant it stops holding their interest. Even when streaming services include advertisements, the interruptions are often shorter and less frequent than those on traditional television and sometimes you can watch for five seconds and then skip through them.

Younger viewers have significantly less tolerance for programming that does not respect their control over their time, or that does not cater to their short attention spans. A television show constructed around eight minutes of programming followed by four minutes of advertising is asking them to accept a bargain they have rarely had to make elsewhere, and I suspect this is part of why the future for traditional network TV is particularly bleak.

What Was Lost

Again, this is not really meant to be an argument that television was better when we had only four channels. More voices can now be heard today. Niche interests can support entire communities and businesses. Independent creators can reach millions of people without first receiving permission or approval from a television network. A child interested in airplanes, fashion, baseball statistics, or the history of ancient Rome can find hours of high-quality programming instantly. This is remarkable and, in many ways, should be celebrated.

But something has been lost in the transition, and that something is the simple act of coming together. Watching TV was once both a private family activity and a public civic activity. We sat in our individual living rooms, but we knew that millions of other people were sitting in theirs, watching the same images at the same moment. We felt emotions together, in a way that brought people together regardless of whether those emotions were joyous or sorrowful.

What comes next for television is probably more fragmentation, followed eventually by some form of re-bundling. Consumers are already discovering that subscribing to ten separate streaming services can be every bit as expensive and annoying as the cable packages of olden times. The companies, in turn, are beginning to bundle their products together again.

Live sports will continue to function as television’s anchor because sports lose much of their value when they are not watched live. A drama can wait until Tuesday. The fourth quarter of the Super Bowl cannot. News will also survive on television, particularly during elections, wars, storms, and other major breaking events, but again, many people, especially young people, now consumer their “news” through Facebook, TikTok, and all the rest.

But the broader monoculture is probably not coming back. We have too many choices, too many screens, and too many algorithms designed to give each of us a personalized version of the world. The days of all watching the same thing together at the same time are passing away. It’s fair to ask, then, what is left to bring people together?

---

Ben Sprague lives and works in Bangor, Maine as a Senior V.P./Commercial Lending Officer for Damariscotta-based First National Bank. He previously worked as an investment advisor and graduated from Harvard University in 2006. Ben can be reached at ben.sprague@thefirst.com or bsprague1@gmail.com. Thoughts and opinions here do not represent First National Bank.