Has Viewers’ Switch to Streaming Impacted News Networks?
By Movieguide® Contributor
With the TV industry flailing, news networks have been hit hard as they struggle to maintain their ratings while refusing to switch to streaming.
Live sports and news are the last two holdouts on the switch from cable and broadcast TV to streaming. These two have kept the industry afloat amidst nationwide cord-cutting that has led to roughly 60% of America dropping their TV subscriptions. Live sports, however, will nearly jump ship, especially when the Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox streaming network Venu finally launches, leaving the news behind to maintain viewership. The news, however, is unlikely to have this kind of pull, especially with the younger generations turning elsewhere for their information.
A study from last November found that half of U.S. adults receive their news from social media rather than from a traditional news source. This shift is likely only going to continue to grow especially as more homes cut their cable subscriptions.
Even as legacy media companies who own these news networks have established themselves in the streaming industry, the news has been unsuccessful in transitioning away from cable. Warner Bros. Discovery, who owns CNN, shut down a news streaming platform in 2022 after sinking $300 million into the venture.
It plans on revamping this switch later this year by including a news add-on that will be available on Max, though it remains unclear if it will find further success this time.
“When you’re in the cable new business already, differentiating what the streaming customer is going to get for paying that extra money for streaming is important,” Mark Lukasiewicz, a former network executive, told The Hill. “I’m not sure anybody has demonstrated in the news space what that is.”
Rather than seeing established news sources jumping into streaming, some in the industry believe new news networks will appear and establish themselves in the space.
“It’s inevitable that more tech giants are going to want to get into the news business,” said Anthony Adornato, an associate professor of broadcast and digital journalism at Syracuse University. “They already control so much of the information the public is getting, it presents them with a real opportunity to offer news that is beneficial to them using the influence they’re already cultivated.”
In some ways, this is already occurring. Apple already offers a news app across its devices; it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to transform this into a full-blown news network that airs on AppleTV+.
Netflix, similarly, could conceivably add a news network onto its platform and find instant success given its broad subscriber reach.
“What happens to TV news at that point is really anyone’s guess,” said Alan Wolk, a media advisor and critic. “But it’s more than likely that it will not resemble the cable news ecosystem that ruled for the past three decades, the one that lived and died on Nielsen ratings.”
Movieguide® previously reported:
A new survey conducted by Variety’s VIP+ explored how social media is slowly becoming people’s No. 1 news source and the danger that that poses to unbiased information.
More recently, legislators have worked to hold big tech companies like Meta and Twitter accountable for their business models, which has proven to censor some news and push other news to the forefront.
This has resulted in a unique unification between democratic and republican legislators, who bind that Big Tech overreach is detrimental to the country as a whole.
“Results from VIP+’s partnership with GetWizer on the ‘Demographic Divide’ report suggest that, especially among younger consumers, social media has a strong level of influence for news and thus may be deserving of more formal oversight,” Variety wroteof their findings.
The survey found that nearly half of respondents, ages 15-29, use social media as news sources. Meanwhile, respondents over the age of 60 believe that misinformation is easier to spread due to the popularity of social media.
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