The battle between streaming and linear TV has ended, at least according to legacy TV executives speaking Monday at UBS’s Global Media and Communications Conference. Rather than transitioning linear content from one distribution model to the next, Comcast President Mike Cavanagh and Fox Chief Financial Officer Steve Tomsic said their respective companies are instead prioritizing how linear and streaming can work together.

Tomsic foresees a future in which linear TV lives in tandem with streaming platforms, although the company’s cross-pollination between its linear networks and platforms Tubi and Fox Nation is still developing.

“The term linear programming is now almost used in the pejorative—we don’t define ourselves by being a linear programmer,” said Tomsic. During Tomsic’s session at the UBS conference, the executive described the blurring of lines between linear and digital distribution and, conversely, a widening gap between content genres. Per Tomsic, linear TV is the domain of sports and news, while streaming has become the home of entertainment.

Charter’s recent agreement with Disney to drop smaller networks such as Freeform in exchange for granting subscribers access to its streamers is a model that Tomsic pointed to as a future for linear TV. Tomsic said combining the forces of both TV models is the solution for “what the consumer is being asked to deal with,” which is to juggle overpriced cable bundles that come with unwanted products and learn the fragmented streaming landscape to access desired content. Fox’s priorities for 2024 are to “build something that sits in the middle, which is truly integrated at a really sharp price point,” said Tomsic.

The divide is shown in advertising: Tomsic said ad revenues for sports content in linear, particularly the NFL, continue to grow and top the market, while primetime entertainment declines in interest for advertisers (as evidenced in Ad Age’s fall 2023 TV pricing chart). On the opposite end of that trend, media companies’ ad revenues in streaming increased across the board in the year’s third quarter. As such, Tubi’s engagement grew 65% and revenue grew 30% quarter over quarter in the quarter ended Sept. 30, according to Fox. Tomsic said he estimates Tubi is currently valued at “a couple billion dollars.”

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Although Fox’s linear and streaming businesses have not been integrated to the point of its competitors, Tomsic said the company has “all the building blocks for us to go DTC if and when that becomes appropriate.”

Cavanagh took a similar stance in his session discussing Comcast’s business when questioned about NBCUniversal and its streaming platform Peacock.

“There’s so much power in the legacy businesses that, even though the linear business model is changing based upon how consumers want to consume, it is the platform to build a future that has to include a digital element as consumers change,” said Cavanagh.

The executive’s response represents a shift in sentiment over the past few months from legacy media companies endeavoring to convince Wall Street of the viability of the media business as tech companies such as Amazon, Google and Netflix take a growing share of audiences. Rather than pose network streamers such as Peacock as competitors, their owners have begun leveraging their entire businesses as pieces in the streaming wars. 

Although Cavanagh referenced the success Amazon has had in transitioning “Thursday Night Football” to pure streaming on Prime Video from Fox, he posed the combination of NBCUniversal’s linear and streaming audience combined as “a leader in reach,” at “around 100 million a month.” 

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This is a far cry from the doom-and-gloom stance that former NBCU CEO Jeff Shell took at last year’s UBS conference. At the time, Shell discussed the proliferation of cord-cutting, saying the decline in audience would outweigh any increases the company might be able to make up in advertising price increases (NBCU reported upfront commitments were flat this year with the year prior).

Peacock has nearly doubled its subscribers since the 2022 UBS conference. Cavanagh reported the streamer has 30 million paid subscribers, generating approximately $10 average revenue per user (ARPU). And it wasn’t lost on Cavanagh that the size of the streaming and linear businesses will soon swap places.

“Don’t forget the counter-narrative of what would it all look like if we weren't trying at Peacock,” said Cavanagh to the interviewer. “You’d be asking a different set of questions, which is where the linear business is going if you’re not trying to figure out a future.”