Linear TV has been on a years-long downward slide as viewers cancel cable subscriptions in favor of curating their favorite channels’ streaming services à la carte. And 2024 will be remembered as a breaking point for the cable ecosystem as numerous legacy media companies have reduced the value of their linear assets and made moves to divorce them from their streaming businesses.

As of November, national household coverage for multi-channel cable services, including digital cable providers (vMVPDs), was 55.32%, according to Nielsen data provided to clients and reviewed by Ad Age. Excluding vMVPDs, national distribution of traditional cable was at 39.33% in November, per Nielsen.

“That’s not national anymore, that’s local,” said one media buyer, who spoke with Ad Age on condition of anonymity, of the declines in networks’ coverage. Both buyers and sellers need to reset their thinking for the role of cable advertising, according to the buyer, who added that historical pricing and deal terms a client and cable seller might have agreed on previously will soon undergo a reckoning. 

For top channels, “they charge high CPMs based on when they were getting really strong ratings and they were delivering 75% to 80% of the country. That’s not what they have anymore.”

Of the 126 cable networks tracked by Nielsen’s data, 91 have dropped below 50% national coverage as of November, factoring both traditional cable and vMVPD coverage. The remaining 35 are in the range of 50% to 55% reach.

The numbers have steadily declined over the years—in November 2021, 43 of 135 cable networks held national reach in the range of 60 to 69%, with 58 networks overall reaching over 50% of households nationally.

“It’s not a, ‘Don’t buy cable,’ it’s an, ‘Understand what you’re buying and that it doesn’t build the reach it once did,’” said a second media buyer. The danger, according to the buyer, is longtime TV advertisers being sluggish in reworking their approach to TV, relying on old habits without understanding the rapidly changing ecosystem.

“We can get the same reach through the TV set this year that we did last year, and the year before,” said the buyer. “But if we think we’re getting the same reach by doing the same buy every year, that’s where we’re mistaken.”

The intensity of these declines was reflected in multiple moves throughout the year from media companies pivoting their cable businesses. Most recently, NBCUniversal-owner Comcast announced it would create a new, independent company next year comprising the majority of NBCU’s cable networks. 

The “SpinCo,” as Comcast is temporarily calling it, will house channels including USA, MSNBC, E! and Oxygen, among others, while NBCU will maintain NBC, Bravo, Telemundo and Peacock. While Comcast reported that the assets making up SpinCo generated $7 billion in revenue from September 2023 to September 2024, the move separates the company’s assets of declining value from those that it predicts will drive business growth via streaming.

Earlier in the year, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery also began setting off alarm bells about the stability of cable when each announced large write-downs in the value of their networks. This came after Disney CEO Bob Iger floated the idea of selling some of the company’s linear assets during a 2023 CNBC interview, which he later retracted.

Read more: IAB’s predictions for 2025

For advertisers, this year represents a turning point in reallocating TV spend away from cable, according to the first buyer. While cable’s decline isn’t new, the gap between the price to advertise in cable and streaming has been too disparate to be able to efficiently replicate buying from one to the other, said the buyer.

However, this year’s upfront saw a reset in streaming pricing, with many of the major platforms’ CPMs coming down from high premiums and getting into closer proximity with one another. The buyer said this will allow advertisers to more easily transition spend with media companies from linear to digital assets without sacrificing large numbers of impressions to maintain a similar budget.

Streaming still makes up a fraction of traditional network groups’ ad revenues. Of those that break out their linear and direct-to-consumer ad revenues in quarterly financial reports, Paramount’s streaming ads made up roughly 23% of its combined ad revenues in the third quarter and Warner Bros. Discovery’s DTC segment made up 12% of its combined ad revenues in the quarter. 

Streaming is set to make up about 25% of the total U.S. national TV ad market, according to Magna’s September forecast. While the agency predicts national streaming ad sales will grow 19.3% to $11 billion this year, it expects national cable and broadcast ad sales to decline 6.8% to $35 billion.