Executives predict TV’s future, deals may decide otherwise

The television industry entered the second half of 2026 in the middle of one of its most active consolidation periods in years, with cable, broadcast and streaming companies all restructuring around the same central problem: fewer people watching TV the way they used to.

CNBC’s 2026 Future of TV survey asked 10 media executives, including ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro, Charter Communications President and CEO Chris Winfrey, Tubi CEO Anjali Sud and former NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Zucker, to forecast where the industry will be in three years.

The survey updated one CNBC first ran in 2023.

Their answers, published Monday by Alex Sherman and Lillian Rizzo, touched on cable subscriber trends, artificial intelligence-driven personalization, government antitrust scrutiny, sports ratings and which streaming service might gain ground next. Several of the executives’ 2023 predictions held up, according to CNBC, including forecasts that linear pay TV would survive with a smaller footprint and that Paramount+ and HBO Max would eventually consolidate.

What follows breaks down five of the executives’ central predictions, along with the deals and data shaping each trend.

Streaming aggregation emerges as a counterweight to cable decline

Winfrey said cable subscriber losses will keep accelerating, driven in part by retransmission costs that now exceed $30 per customer for over-the-air content. He predicted that broadcast and cable programming will increasingly live inside large streaming bundles, and said he expects Netflix to eventually be part of that kind of bundling.

Roku Media President Charlie Collier and RedBird IMI CEO Jeff Zucker both told CNBC cable would not disappear entirely but would keep shrinking, with Zucker tying its longer-term survival to sports rights eventually leaving the platform.

The prediction arrives as Charter works through its own answer to subscriber decline.

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The Federal Communications Commission approved Charter’s $34.5 billion acquisition of Cox Communications in February, and California’s Public Utilities Commission cleared the last remaining regulatory hurdle on Aug. 13, with the deal expected to close the week of Aug. 18.

The combined company will serve roughly 35.6 million residential and business customers, making it the largest broadband and video provider in the country by subscriber count. Charter lost 172,000 internet subscribers in the second quarter of 2026 heading into the deal’s close.

That backdrop lends weight to Winfrey’s aggregation argument: a cable operator absorbing a rival at scale while its underlying subscriber base keeps eroding is precisely the condition he described as pushing operators toward bundled streaming as the next distribution model.

Personalization and commerce move from experiment to infrastructure

Pitaro predicted personalization will become close to universal within three years, extending beyond content recommendations into content creation tailored to individual viewers. Sud made a similar prediction for advertising, saying she expects TV ads to reach the level of relevance seen on social media platforms. Pitaro also pointed to commerce integration, citing ESPN’s existing in-app purchasing feature as an early version of a capability he expects to expand toward direct links to retail partners.

For broadcast and production teams, the more concrete version of this trend so far has shown up in immersive sports production rather than advertising.

Spectrum Front Row, Charter’s collaboration with the NBA and Apple, delivers Los Angeles Lakers games to Apple Vision Pro headsets at up to 150 megabits per second across seven camera positions, including the scorer’s table, both baskets, the player tunnel and a roaming courtside angle. The feed is directed and produced specifically for the headset rather than repurposed from a standard broadcast, giving the industry an early production template for viewer-specific formats beyond conventional camera cutting.

Disney’s $1.5 billion equity investment in Epic Games, announced in 2024 and still being built out, is a related bet, aimed at connecting Disney franchises to an interactive platform with more than 3 billion global gamers rather than a traditional broadcast or streaming audience.

Tech-Hollywood convergence is colliding with regulatory friction

Sud told CNBC the convergence between Silicon Valley and Hollywood has already occurred, pointing to tech platforms capturing the largest share of television viewing time. Zucker predicted continued scrutiny of large technology companies, tying its intensity to the outcomes of the 2026 and 2028 elections.

Former MSNBC President Rashida Jones pointed to industry pushback, including a letter from roughly 1,000 Hollywood professionals opposing the pending Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery deal, as a possible check on further consolidation.

That friction is already visible in deals moving through regulatory review.

The Charter-Cox merger cleared the FCC in February after Charter agreed to end diversity, equity and inclusion policies at the agency’s request, then cleared California only after the state’s Public Utilities Commission separately imposed $310 million in enforceable conditions the FCC had not required, including a $275 million broadband upgrade commitment. Fox’s pending $22 billion acquisition of Roku, meanwhile, is not expected to close until the first half of 2027, in part because of the scale of the combination, which would make Fox the third-largest player in U.S. television by share of viewing.

The pattern suggests that even deals framed as consolidation within traditional media, rather than a tech company absorbing a studio outright, are drawing extended and sometimes state-level review, a dynamic that could shape how the largest pending deal, Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, proceeds through federal antitrust review.

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Sports ratings growth is partly a measurement story, not only an audience story

Pitaro rejected the idea that sports viewership is in a ratings bubble, pointing to improved measurement, including out-of-home and streaming data, as one reason numbers keep climbing. Nielsen’s Brian Fuhrer told CNBC that methodological changes, particularly expanded out-of-home measurement, have driven real increases that the company expects to continue, though not at a large year-over-year pace. Jones offered the lone dissent among the executives, predicting sports viewership will eventually hit a ceiling as distribution broadens across more platforms.

The scale of Nielsen’s recent methodology changes helps explain why ratings comparisons have gotten more complicated. Nielsen expanded out-of-home measurement to cover the entire United States starting in February 2025, up from panels that previously covered about two-thirds of the country. 

Nielsen has also piloted a co-viewing measurement update, tested during Super Bowl LX in February, that it aims to fold into official ratings in time for the 2026-27 season, marking a third major change to Nielsen’s methodology in roughly 20 months.

For programmers and advertisers, that timeline means at least one more round of ratings increases this fall will need to be read against a shifting measurement baseline rather than as a clean audience trend.

Ad-supported and aggregator platforms are the next competitive battleground

Executives broadly agreed that today’s largest streaming services will remain the largest in three years, but named different challengers for the tier below.

Disney Entertainment Television Chairman Debra OConnell pointed to Instagram’s recent moves into TV formats as a signal that an unexpected platform could gain share. Winfrey again raised the idea of a new aggregator emerging to bundle services the way cable once did. Nielsen’s Fuhrer specifically named free ad-supported services, including Roku Channel, Tubi and Pluto, as platforms gaining adoption as they add original content. Pitaro named Epic Games as his answer, citing Disney’s existing investment.

Roku’s own position going into 2027 illustrates both the opportunity and the crowding Fuhrer described. The Roku Channel currently holds about 3 percent of all U.S. streaming viewership, placing it fifth behind YouTube, Netflix, Disney and Amazon’s Prime Video, according to Nielsen data cited in Fox’s acquisition announcement. Fox’s pending purchase is explicitly designed to combine that audience with Fox’s Tubi service and its news and sports programming to compete more directly with the top four.

The predictions assume a market structure that is still being litigated

Read against the deal calendar, the executives’ forecasts share a structural assumption: that the industry three years from now will be organized around a settled, if smaller, set of owners. The pending transactions suggest that assumption is doing more work than the survey format allows for.

Start with timing. Charter-Cox, the most straightforward of the four deals, still took roughly 15 months from announcement to close and required a state regulator to impose $310 million in conditions the federal government had not asked for. Fox-Roku, a comparable-sized combination, is on a similar clock and will not close until 2027. Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery cleared every regulator it needed to, in 68 countries, and is still blocked, not by antitrust economics but by a state lawsuit that will not go to trial before Paramount’s own outside date of June 2027.

None of the three deals executives cited as reshaping the competitive landscape will be fully resolved before the three-year window CNBC asked them to forecast is roughly two-thirds over.

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That timing matters more for some predictions than others. Winfrey’s bet on Netflix eventually joining a large streaming bundle, and Jones’s expectation of industry pushback slowing consolidation, are not independent forecasts about consumer behavior. They are, in part, predictions about how the Paramount-WBD litigation and the second Comcast spinoff resolve, since the number and size of the companies left standing determines who has the scale to build or join a bundle in the first place. A ruling against Paramount, or a further delay past the merger’s outside date, would leave a different set of potential aggregators in the market than a ruling that lets the deal close on schedule.

The regulatory pattern across the deals also complicates the “convergence” the executives described. Sud and Zucker both framed the collision of Silicon Valley and Hollywood as an established, ongoing shift. But the deals actually moving through review are traditional media companies combining with each other, or with a hardware and adtech platform in Roku’s case, not the technology platforms themselves acquiring studios or networks.

The friction so far, DEI-related conditions at the FCC, a $310 million buildout mandate in California, a 12-state antitrust suit against Paramount, has landed on consolidation within the existing media industry rather than on the tech companies executives named as the more disruptive competitors. Whether that pattern extends to the next tech-adjacent transaction, rather than the next media-on-media one, is untested.

For programmers and production companies, the practical effect is that decisions on rights bundling, distribution windows and format investment, the kind of choices Landgraf described around day-and-date global releases or Winfrey described around immersive sports production, are being made against an ownership map that will not be finalized for at least another year, and in Paramount’s case, possibly not until mid-2027. The executives were asked what television looks like in three years. Part of the answer depends on litigation outcomes that have not yet been scheduled.