The cord-cutter fallacy and the current subscription streaming landscape
For the past 15 years, the phrase “cutting the cord,” particularly in the US, has been a key part of the vocabulary of those discussing the rise of the streaming giants and viewers’ move away from traditional cable broadcasters. To define the term more clearly, it refers to the shift from the broadcast TV providers’ bundled monopoly of services, not necessarily supplied by cable, but also by satellite providers and traditional broadcasters. However, the term itself now signifies three distinct changes to the environment: a change in viewer behaviour, the slow decline of a well-established broadcast TV business model, and a key lifestyle choice made by the viewers.
The pitch to the viewer in the early days of Amazon and Netflix was that by cutting the cord and opting out of traditional broadcast TV services—which usually cost around $100 in the US or between €40 and €65 in the EU—they could save money while accessing a similar portfolio of content.
The counter argument has always been that by the time viewers have subscribed to a number of streaming subscriptions and are paying for the broadband required to watch them, they would have arrived back where they started, spending that same €65 on a more fragmented service. This argument was being dismissed as recently as 5 years ago, cemented by the belief that there was still ample headroom between the cost of standard television packages and the cost of multiple streaming services.
The Economics of Subscription Streaming in Europe Today
Looking at the number of subscription services available in Europe today, that headroom seems to have rapidly disappeared. The big commercial story of 2025 was an end to the services seeming to compete on price. For a number of years, new entrants coming into the market tended to charge roughly €6, sharply undercutting Amazon Prime and Netflix as well as broadcast TV packages from Sky and Virgin.
Over the last year, we have seen a move toward price discipline across every major streaming platform. Netflix reported $45 billion in annual revenue for 2025, a 12% year-over-year rise, with its operating margin climbing to 30% and advertising revenue nearly doubling to $1.5 billion. Amazon moved the bulk of its Prime Video subscribers onto an ad-supported tier by default, making ad-free viewing a paid upgrade, and saw its own video ad revenue climb steeply.
However, Disney+, a relatively new entrant, raised prices across every service tier in October 2025 and lost almost no subscribers, growing to 131.6 million by year-end. In the case of almost all providers big and small, the lower tier of the service either went up in price or stayed the same but introduced advertising. This supports the idea that viewers are happy to put up with a price increase or ads or a combination of the two, meaning that with negligible churn, the service has become an “essential” expense.
The reason that one of the main principles of cord cutting, significant savings for the viewer, has failed is not that individual services are expensive. Most are still relatively cheap when compared to broadcast TV packages. But to access all of the content they want, many households have more than one subscription.
In the UK, for example, 32% of households that use a streaming service have one subscription, but most households have two or more subscriptions: 26% have two, 22% have three, and 20% have more than three. Given the combined costs of subscribing to three or more services, this is no longer a cost-cutting exercise but simply viewers spending to configure their service with their ideal set of programming. In some cases, this might actually cost more than a typical broadcast TV package.
Enter the Aggregators
While saving money has been a motivating factor for some, given the number of households with multiple subscriptions, it makes more sense to consider the possibility that what viewers were actually seeking was more control, more choice, and the absence of the long-term contracts associated with broadcast TV packages.
One of the most interesting developments of 2026 was that when HBO Max finally launched in the UK, the broadcaster Sky responded by bundling the service into a single package with Sky channels, Disney+, Netflix, and Hayu at around £24 a month.
Sky’s Ultimate TV package debuted in February
As viewers increasingly have to manage a series of fragmented services while still seeking value for their money, the real winners could be those services like Sky that can help aggregate all of the content into one place, where it can easily be searched as if on a single service. The strands of the cut cord may be being individually reattached, with services like Sky weaving them back together. This also plays into Sky’s recent acquisition strategy, which I will discuss later.
Rumours of Broadcast TV’s Collapse…
Another element of the cord-cutter fallacy is how it has been viewed by the industry and analysts, and it is almost the mirror image of the assumed viewer motivation. Where viewers seemed to have overestimated the savings they can see, the industry has spent years oscillating between overestimating and underestimating the disruption and costs of the changes to the industry.
The most extreme view was that within a couple of years, cord cutting would lead to the complete collapse of the traditional TV business, cannibalising it until there was no viable business model left. At the other end of the spectrum were those who characterised the erosion of the existing business as a slow drip, drip, too small to matter, suggesting that streaming growth was simply additive to a stable TV broadcast business. Of course, the truth fell in between these two diametrically opposed viewpoints.
What both 2025 and 2026 demonstrated is that the broadcast TV business hasn’t yet died, but is changing shape with much consolidation. The two big developments were the contest for Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming assets and Sky’s acquisition of ITV’s channel and streaming business in the UK.
With Warner Bros., Netflix bid $82.7 billion, raised its offer to fend off Paramount Skydance, and then, on 26 Feb. 2026, withdrew, judging that at the price required to beat Paramount Skydance’s $30-per-share offer, the deal was no longer financially attractive. Paramount Skydance’s bid to absorb Warner Bros. Discovery’s film, television, and HBO Max operations was halted in late July by antitrust review. It also faces a backdrop of vocal objections from the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA about the effect on wages, jobs, and theatrical distribution. At press time, the merger appeared delayed until mid-2027.
This looks like the behaviour of an industry going through a period of maturation and consolidation rather than one which is dying, as the existing businesses buy scale because organic growth has become too slow and too expensive to sustain alone.
Sky’s ITV purchase, in turn, is more about distribution than content creation. ITV Studios, which creates a lot of content for both ITV and other channels in the UK, including the BBC, is not part of the deal. Sky is buying the channels and the ITVX streaming platform, which already has a content-sharing agreement with Disney+, with the aim of creating a UK streaming powerhouse to rival the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+.
Comcast/Sky’s ITV acquisition includes the ITVX streaming platform but not ITV’s content-producing ITV Studios.
The Rise of Live+
This highlights the key flaw in the death-of-television narrative, which mistook a change of delivery mechanism for a change in the viewer’s appetite for content. Viewers didn’t want less content; they wanted to not be tied to a single provider through their set-top box and long contracts. The clearest evidence for this argument comes from the growth of live content—particularly on traditionally VOD-centric platforms—long assumed to be broadcast TV’s strongest remaining unique selling point.
Netflix spent 2025–2026 acquiring WWE’s Raw, staging an NFL Christmas doubleheader, showing the Canelo Álvarez-Terence Crawford fight, and producing original live content such as Skyscraper Live. Amazon leaned into sport with the NBA, the NHL, and European football rights, its UEFA Champions League deal running through the 2030–2031 season. This migration of live sport to streaming platforms is all about a change of distribution model, not a change in demand. Live is still commanding huge viewership, but is now not reliant on broadcast TV platforms.
Amazon’s Champions League UEFA football deal runs through 2030–31.
User-Generated Content and Creator Platforms
Also in the mix are platforms such as YouTube and, to a certain extent, Twitch, which are delivering predominantly user-generated content directly to viewers rather than creating content themselves. In December 2025, for example, YouTube surpassed the BBC in total UK viewers for the first time, with 51.9 million against the BBC’s 50.8 million.
The response to this increasing audience on YouTube and the growth of the YouTube app on TV (views rose from 28% to 35% between January 2024 and December 2025) is that many of the channels have been moving their content onto YouTube as a delivery mechanism or creating bespoke content, as Channel 4 in the UK has been doing for some time.
UK’s Channel 4 on YouTube
The BBC will begin to do something similar, where the number of channels will be vastly increased to 50 under a new deal that includes content created specifically for YouTube. This highlights again that the industry’s so-called cord-cutter-driven transformation is about a change of distribution mechanism rather than a viewer’s loss of interest in content.
Broadband Providers Still Growing
The final element of the cord-cutter fallacy is that it means the end of dependence on a single provider; however, that hardly ever happens. All of the streamers still require a broadband connection, and that service is frequently delivered by providers who offer TV or streaming services.
A 2025 study found that households actually increased their internet usage by around 18% when they didn’t have a broadcast TV service. When viewers cut payments to broadcast TV services, the relationship between viewer and supplier was renegotiated, not ended. While the content was removed, the broadband cord was not cut. The content strands were simply woven together from different services into a new pattern.
This ambiguity around the definition of “cord-cutter” has consequences for how the industry thinks about its viewers. If “cord-cutter” describes anyone who has changed their viewing habits, regardless of whom they pay for connectivity, then the category is massive and tends to be affluent, older than the stereotype suggests, and crucially still entirely reachable through the supplier’s infrastructure.
This means that marketers who view cord-cutters as young, cable-averse cheapskates are working from an easy (and misguided) assumption rather than the actual available data. The viewers who cut the cord are often paying more in total to their broadband supplier—quite often their former TV provider—along with additional streaming services, just for a different selection of content.
The cord-cutter fallacies have coalesced into a single assumption: that cutting the cord is a discrete, one-directional event with a stable meaning. Based on the notion that the viewer considered it a financial transaction that ended in savings, the industry treated the so-called cord-cutting trend as a major structural change that would end in collapse, and analysts thought of it as a severance that ends in independence.
None of this is entirely true because the process was never a single event that viewers were part of. It was and remains a continuous renegotiation of who supplies and aggregates content, who has the customer relationship, and who collects the monthly payment, where multiple suppliers can be involved in each stage.
The Long and Short of the Cord-Cutter Fallacy
The question we ask should not be, “Has the cord been successfully cut?” Rather, it should be, “Where do the new strands run to and from?”
The winning providers in the next evolution of the market will not be new disruptors who promise liberation, but the aggregators, consolidators, and rightsholders who understand that viewers want the bundle’s convenience without its old constraints. Perhaps they’ll find viewers paying handsomely for a well-packaged version of exactly the thing they are assumed to be fleeing.
Sky’s multi-service plan, the potential Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, and the pivot to advertising and live content are all bets on the same insight, along with Netflix’s deals with Penske Media, BuzzFeed Studios, Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines, Tastemade, and People, Inc. to licence short-form content to compete further with YouTube.
Short-form content on Netflix
Over the next year, the oversimplified cord-cutter fallacy will finally be put to bed. Consolidation and aggregation will continue, as smaller platforms seek critical mass through mergers, content-sharing deals, and aggregation. Viewers will tire of managing multiple logins and reward whoever simplifies the experience. With the fallacy dismissed, the providers will see their viewers more clearly not as people who cut a cord, but as an audience who are perpetually choosing which strands to pull.