I’m not a media analyst. Smarter people than me — like Evan Shapiro, who you should follow on LinkedIn — dissect this industry for a living. But I spent years working inside broadcast television, and I’ve been chewing on this particular problem for more than a decade. So here’s my slightly obsessive take on how television drove itself off a cliff while everyone inside the building kept arguing about the curtains.
Before I ever set foot in a TV network, I was just a regular person watching TV and slowly losing my mind.
Not because the shows were bad. Because by the time a commercial break ended, I’d forgotten what I was watching, seen the same car ad four times, and developed a personal grudge against a pharmaceutical company whose product I didn’t need and couldn’t pronounce. You know the ones. Side effects may include everything up to and including death, delivered cheerfully over footage of people on a picnic.
The numbers explain it. A one-hour show on American television runs about 42 to 44 minutes of actual content. The rest is commercials. By the mid-2010s some cable networks were cramming close to 20 minutes of ads into every hour. A third of your time, gone, often to the same three ads cycling through on a loop like a cognitive endurance test.
That was the problem, and the industry didn’t think it was a problem. They were making absurd money. There was no alternative. So it kept getting worse.
My path into the industry was a winding one. Music video production in the MTV era, then commercials, then visual effects and graphic design, then a network rebrand for ZDF in Germany with Lee Hunt and Razorfish. We were in Frankfurt making graphic packages, and that was my doorway in.
Not long after, I got a call to work on a VH1 rebrand — funny enough, right inside the MTV building. New logo, style guides, brand mapped across every surface of the network. You quickly learn that a logo lives in more places than anyone tracks. Someone, somewhere, has a sticky note with it on their desk, and you will not find that sticky note until six months after launch.
From there I moved into the broader network world — on-air graphics, motion packages, the visual language of television. I was inside the system. And from inside the system, you could see exactly what was happening, and exactly what nobody wanted to do about it.
In the early 2000s, TiVo showed up. DVRs went mainstream. Viewers did exactly what you’d expect: started skipping commercials like it was a competitive sport.
Advertisers — who had been spending billions at the upfronts — started asking the uncomfortable question. Why are we paying you this much if people are fast-forwarding through our ads? Completely fair.
The obvious answer was sitting right there on the table. Shorten the breaks. Make them short enough that skipping feels like more effort than just watching. Keep people in their seats. Give advertisers viewers who are actually present, instead of phantom eyeballs blurring past at 4x speed.
They didn’t do that. What we came up with were tricks. Drop a piece of the program in the middle of the break so DVR users hit play. Run a cliffhanger tease right before the break to keep people from flipping. Little Band-Aids applied to a severed artery.
The part that gets me, looking back, is that everyone inside the building knew. The people running these networks watched television too. They had DVRs. They skipped commercials like everyone else did. This wasn’t a mystery anyone was failing to diagnose. Cutting ad time was just the third rail of broadcast — touch it and your quarterly earnings died — and the unspoken strategy, as best I could tell, was to hope the reckoning landed after you’d collected your bonus and retired. The drug was good and the withdrawal would have hurt. So they kept using.
I get why nobody volunteered to give it up. The money was genuinely insane. EBITDA margins for cable networks were running 38 to 42 percent. Cable operators — the Comcasts running the wire into your house — were closer to 50 percent on broadband. For context, the average profit margin across the U.S. economy is around 15.
Evan Shapiro, who came in to give a talk during this period, made a point that stuck with me. He noted that the only other legitimate-ish industry hitting margins like that was drug dealers. Which, when you think about it, explains a lot about how cable treated its customers.
There’s a whole story about how those margins got built in the first place — government-granted local monopolies, the 1984 Cable Act, decades of operators buying media companies to own both ends of the transaction. I wrote that one out separately in BrokeCon by Design Part 20: Corporate Socialism. For this post the relevant point is just that the cash flow felt invincible, and the same cash flow that made them feel invincible was the thing destroying their ability to adapt.
While all this was happening, the music industry was doing the dress rehearsal of cable’s own future, one building over.
Napster launched in 1999 and within a couple of years had tens of millions of people sharing music for free. The labels, whose entire model depended on selling CDs, responded by suing teenagers and trying to legislate the internet out of existence. Napster had actually built a functioning digital music platform — the infrastructure was there, the audience was there. The labels could have bought it, licensed it, figured out the monetization, and owned the future. Instead they fought it, won in court, and watched the audience they’d alienated move on to the next file-sharing platform, and the next one.
Eventually the labels got streaming, but on someone else’s terms, at a fraction of what they used to make, after the leverage had permanently shifted away from them.
Television was watching all of this happen in real time, and drew no conclusions whatsoever.
MTV launched in 1981 and it was genuinely great. A whole channel of music videos. Brilliant. It captured pop culture in a way nothing had before. And it planted the seed that eventually undermined the whole ecosystem, because MTV proved niche programming worked. You didn’t need to be everything to everyone across three broadcast channels. You could be one specific thing to one specific audience and that was a business.
Cable ran with this and launched a hundred channels. History, cooking, learning, comedy, sports, nature. Niche everything.
Then, slowly, they all became the same channel. The Learning Channel became TLC and started airing reality shows about cakes. MTV stopped playing music. History Channel discovered that aliens were apparently involved in most of human civilization. Every niche channel drifted toward generic entertainment, because generic entertainment is cheaper to produce and easier to sell ads against. Now you had 200 channels of roughly the same thing, each running 18 minutes of commercials per hour.
Netflix launched its streaming service in 2007. Hulu followed. The audience — the one that had been sitting through 18 minutes of commercials per hour for decades, the one that had been speed-running through DVR breaks for years — discovered they could just not do that anymore.
YouTube quietly became one of the biggest TV screens in America. Full-length content, news, sports highlights, documentaries, creator programming, all of it on people’s televisions every day. That audience belonged to cable once. Every one of those eyeballs was a viewer the networks trained, cultivated, and then drove away with 18 minutes of ads and 500 channels of the same thing.
The networks’ response, when it came, was to launch their own streaming services. Peacock, Max, Paramount+, Disney+. They were chasing, not leading, and they did it the worst possible way — cannibalizing the content libraries they’d spent decades building, gutting their cable channels in the process, laying off experienced staff and hiring cheaper labor for the “new space.” The classic dying-industry move. Cut costs, call it a pivot, wonder why the product keeps getting worse.
The cable bundle had trained viewers to expect a lot of content for one monthly fee. What they got instead was a dozen separate subscriptions for content that used to live in one place, at prices that collectively add up to more than the cable bill they cancelled. Netflix for the originals, Max for HBO, Paramount+ for Yellowstone, Disney+ for Marvel and Star Wars, Peacock for the NFL games NBC used to just air — plus a separate live TV package if you want sports in real time. Congratulations. You’ve reinvented cable. But worse, more expensive, and with more login screens.
In late 2024, Comcast announced it was spinning off most of its cable networks into a separate company. Because cable networks are, in the words of analysts now being paid to say what was obvious fifteen years ago, “structurally broken.” That’s the technical term for “we had it and we blew it.”
The fix was never complicated. Shorten the breaks. Four to six minutes per hour instead of sixteen to eighteen. A sponsor billboard at the open, a short break or two in the middle, a quick close. Viewers wouldn’t have needed to skip, because there wasn’t enough to skip. Advertisers would have been reaching present, engaged eyeballs instead of phantom DVR traffic. Fewer ads seen by more attentive people is better for the advertiser. And the audience wouldn’t have had a reason to flee, because the experience of watching cable wouldn’t have been something you needed to escape.
Was there a short-term hit? Yes. Did anyone in the room have the spine to absorb a couple of bad quarters in exchange for not losing the entire audience? Apparently not. Because the margins were 50 percent, and you don’t walk away from 50 percent. Not with quarterly earnings calls and shareholder expectations and a cable company parent that viewed its media division as a subscriber-retention tool rather than a creative endeavor with its own health to protect.
So they didn’t fix it. They put Band-Aids on it. And now they’re spinning off the cable channels and everyone is framing it as strategy rather than consequence.
The people running these networks knew the commercial load was pushing viewers away. They knew DVRs were a signal. They knew Netflix was a signal. They knew the music industry was a cautionary tale playing out in real time in the adjacent building. They chose the next quarter every time.
The golden goose didn’t die of natural causes. They ate it themselves, and then they charged you a streaming fee for the leftovers.
Even that's Odd 
Leave a comment