28 When U.S. pay-television falls below roughly 40 million subscribing households — a threshold that may arrive within the next several years — linear television may cease functioning as a true mass-reach advertising medium. Like newspapers and broadcast radio before it, it will remain commercially valuable but increasingly specialized. Live sports will probably determine how long that transition is delayed. Looking back over half a century, every era of television has been defined by a different competitive advantage. Broadcast rewarded those who controlled distribution. Cable rewarded those who assembled the bundle. Streaming rewarded those with the strongest content libraries and direct consumer relationships. The AI era may reward something altogether different. Television no longer competes primarily against other television. It competes against every claim on human attention and time: YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, gaming, newsletters, social media, and increasingly, AI itself. The scarce resource is no longer programming. It is attention. History suggests one final lesson. The industry’s official future is almost always an improved version of its present. The real future usually arrives from somewhere the incumbents weren’t looking. That was true of home video. It was true of streaming. There is every reason to believe it will be true again. (Continued From Page 26) saw essentially the same commercial. Streaming began dismantling that assumption through household-level targeting. Artificial intelligence may complete the transition. Instead of producing one automobile commercial, manufacturers may produce thousands — each tailored to a viewer’s geography, interests, purchasing history, family composition, or even the weather outside. This transition will not occur uniformly around the world. The U.S., having built the world’s largest cable infrastructure, is also unwinding it the fastest. Much of Western Europe is following a similar path through different regulatory and commercial structures. Many Asian, African, and Latin American markets are bypassing much of the traditional cable era altogether, moving directly from broadcast television to broadband and mobilefirst streaming. The routes differ. The destination increasingly looks the same: less dependence on linear distribution, greater consumer control, and increasingly intelligent platforms. VIDEOAGE October 2026 Predictions & Reality
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