Cable TV Is the New Landline

People have been predicting the death of cable TV for a long time, but this really might be it. The share of American homes that pay for conventional TV service is closing in on 50 percent, according to recent assessments from the investment analyst Craig Moffett and S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Kagan research group. For comparison, cellphones were around for decades before the percentage of Americans who didn’t have a landline telephone at home reached 50 percent, around 2017. (In the most recent government figures, about one-third of American adults have a landline.) TV experts didn’t single out one tipping point in cable TV’s big shrink. They said the downward trend was more like a series of creeping changes that piled up. Yet what may be a terminal decline of America’s cable TV industrial complex is a big deal. It shows that technology can change entrenched ways of doing things slowly, and then suddenly, with profound ripple effects.

[Shira Ovide writes the On Tech newsletter for the New York Times.]