Red Pill or Blue Pill?

A few years ago…

I was on a panel at the Needham investor conference.  

Laura Martin had packed the room with the smartest investors in media, people who could quote churn rates and CPMs from memory.

Their questions were sharp, but something was off. They saw the shift from linear TV to streaming as one big moment, not a series of steps.

That day, I riffed on an idea that became The Streaming Decade in Four Steps.  It’s now my most-shared framework.

Now, it’s time for the next phase, a year-by-year forecast for the next decade of streaming.

Let’s break it down into 3 big questions:
1) How I built it
2) What are the major steps for streaming passing linear TV?
3) What’s next?

How I built it

This post kicks off a 5-part update to The Streaming Decade in Four Steps.

The original framework broke the shift into four parts:
1) Total reach
2) Time spent
3) Ad spend
4) Ad impressions

To model the next 10 years, I built atomic-level forecasts for:
1) Ad-free vs. ad-supported viewing
2) Each platform’s share of ad-supported time
3) How much TV time is ad-supported vs. ad-free
4) Ad minutes per hour and total ad minutes

How to read the charts:
1) Solid line = eMarketer projections through 2027
2) Dashed line = My forecasts for 2028–2035

The steps for streaming to pass linear

Reach (2025-2035):
1) Linear TV - 61% → 48% (↓ 22%)
2) Streaming TV - 69% → 78% (↑ 12%)

Time spent (2025-2035):
1) Linear TV - 51% → 31% (↓ 39%)
2) Streaming TV - 49% → 69% (↑ 40%)

As I discussed last week, sports and news still anchor linear TV.  If they move faster to streaming, share jumps even more.

Streaming share of TV time in 2035:
1) Conservative - 69%
2) Bull - 80%
3) Super Bull - 90%

Ad spend (2025-2035):
1) Linear TV - 61% → 29% (↓ 52%)
2) Streaming TV - 39% → 71% (↑ 81%)

Ad impressions (2025-2035):
1) Linear TV - 78% → 38% (↓ 52%)
2) Streaming TV - 22% → 62% (↑ 185%)

Remember those scenarios for time spent?  If streaming time grows faster, ad impressions follow.

Bottom line: Taking the red pill means accepting that linear decline isn’t cyclical, it’s terminal.

The new winners: It is one thing to understand the overall shift from linear to streaming. The next level of insight is understanding that the companies that will win in streaming are different from those currently in control of linear.

What’s next?

In the coming posts, I’ll break down each of the four steps and show how streaming overtakes linear, year by year.

This is where the decade-long story of streaming turns into a play-by-play.