Nolte: Streaming Will Never Be as Profitable for Hollywood as the Cable TV Scam

For over a decade, I’ve been exposing the cable TV scam, urging people to cut their cable TV cords, and move to streaming. My crusade wasn’t just about saving people money; it was also to put an end to what I call left-wing affirmative for a bunch of left-wing outlets that could not survive without the cable TV scam. Nobody watches CNN, MTV, Comedy Central, or a bunch of other leftist outlets that pump out hate and lies 24/7. So how do they stay on the air? How do they remain profitable? Well, it sure as hell isn’t merit in the form of viewership numbers translated into advertising dollars. No, they are profitable only because if you want cable TV, you MUST include them in your overpriced package. This means that whether or not you watch them, these networks still receive a chunk of your cable bill. CNN averages about 400,000 viewers. No network can sustain itself with so few viewers. CNN’s profit comes from the left-wing affirmative action because CNN receives a piece of your cable bill simply because you are forced to include it in your cable package. It’s all rigged so that CNN makes money from you whether you watch or not. Streaming changes all of that. Streaming is merit-based. You’re not forced to subscribe to every streaming outlet. You subscribe only to the streamers you like. This is why CNN’s streaming service died in less than 30 days. Streaming is upending all of that. You see, cable was infinitely more profitable than streaming because cable was 1) a local monopoly with only one provider in your area and cable was 2) immune to ratings because networks no one watched made money merely by forcing you to pay for them through your insanely expensive cable package. Let me put it this way… The money Disney makes per cable TV subscriber (my best educated guess) is around $20 per month. Add to that the billions earned from cable TV advertising. You can subscribe to Disney+ plus Hulu, plus ESPN for $22.00 a month. That cost is with ads, but cable TV is 20 minutes of ads per hour. Streaming TV is nowhere near that punishing, which means the advertising revenue is nowhere near that. Add to that the astronomical costs involved in investing billions and billions of dollars in original content for these streamers. Here’s another look at it… “In the third quarter of 2016, NBCUniversal’s traditional cable TV networks produced $893 million in operating cash flow. In the third quarter of 2026, Peacock generated $261 million in adjusted EBITDA, Comcast’s current metric for operating cash flow,” reports CordCutters News. “That figure represents a drop of roughly 71 percent from the 2016 level, leaving Peacock’s quarterly result at less than one-third of what the legacy cable networks generated at their peak.” “Streaming lacks the structural advantages of the old bundle, including guaranteed distribution across large pay-TV footprints and the ability to spread content costs across a captive audience. Limited competition vs. what is out there now,” adds the report. “[L]imited competition” was the fact you only had one cable provider in your area and a couple of satellite providers (i.e. DirecTV) that basically all offered the same packages at the same price. The report goes on to point out that “Content spending remains high to attract and retain [streaming] viewers, while advertising revenue is more variable.” And then comes the true threat to the studios: “When looking at the long game, increasingly cheaper or free [streaming] services from places like Roku are seeing strong growth as others who are driving up prices are struggling.” Obviously, the studios provide almost all of the content to free streaming services like Roku, Pluto, and Tubi, so there will always be money to be made, but nowhere near the money the cable grift offered, which is why these entertainment corporations have watched their stock price grow stagnant or outright over the last decade: Free streamers, where the money comes from the merit of advertising revenue based on viewership, is the future, and that’s a beautiful thing. With cable TV, you were stuck, but Hollywood couldn’t lose. After almost every household in America had cable, it was still a growing industry through those insane price increases. And customers could not do anything about those price increases because there was no competition. If you wanted your Fox News, you set your jaw and paid $150 a month for cable TV — and part of that $150 a month went directly to outlets that hate you, like CNN, MTV, and Comedy Central. Streaming changes all of that. If Disney+, or Netfix, or whomever, hits you with a price increase, you cancel. Maybe you game the system and subscribe to Disney+ during a two-month discount offer, binge everything you want to see, cancel, and wait for another offer next year. Only idiots still subscribe to cable.