Broadcast TV’s Next Act May Be Smaller, Sharper, And More Selective

LocalProximity
Written By Tim Hanlon

A provocative research note from investment analyst LightShed Partners last week posed a question that would have sounded unthinkable for most of the modern television era: should broadcast networks scrap entertainment programming altogether?

It is a deliberately jarring proposition — but one rooted in data that is increasingly difficult to ignore. Over the past two decades, non-sports primetime viewership on broadcast has fallen by more than 75%, while audiences for the National Football League have continued to grow, even reaching new highs in the most recent season despite the steady erosion of the pay-TV bundle. At the same time, retransmission consent economics are increasingly tied to sports — particularly the NFL — raising a more pointed issue: if entertainment programming neither sustains mass audiences nor meaningfully underwrites affiliate fees, what exactly is its role on broadcast television?

This is where the industry’s long-running “debate” between sports and entertainment begins to look less like a live question and more like a rhetorical holdover. The market has already drawn the distinction. The more consequential issue is what kind of broadcast business remains once that reality is fully acknowledged — not just in theory, but in practice.

An Uncomfortable Question Moves To Center Stage

The traditional broadcast model was built on a simple premise: networks programmed a continuous linear schedule that blended sports, scripted dramas and comedies, unscripted franchises, personality-driven talk, and scheduled news blocks into a single 24/7 flow. That construct held because mass audiences remained relatively concentrated, retransmission consent revenues were scaling, and the network schedule itself functioned as a high-value aggregation layer. Today, that foundation is under significantly more strain. Audience fragmentation, cord-cutting, and the rise of streaming haven’t just eroded viewership—they’ve fundamentally altered the role broadcast television is meant to play in the broader video ecosystem.

The clearest evidence remains the widening gap between sports and everything else. NFL programming continues to deliver the kind of live, high-attention audiences that still support premium advertising and retransmission leverage. Non-sports entertainment, by comparison, has experienced a long decline in investment and linear relevance. That does not mean entertainment content is worthless, but it does mean the economics are more fragile and the strategic case is weaker than it once was.

From Programming Mix To Operating Model

This is where the conversation shifts from programming preference to operating model. Broadcast networks and their affiliated stations have historically been built around the idea that they must fill the full day with either network-supplied, syndicated-sourced or station-produced content. That “always on” framework made sense when the channel itself was the destination. It becomes harder to defend when the channel is increasingly just one distribution path among many — and often not the most important one for any given category of content.

There is a growing case that the next phase of local broadcast television will involve a more selective use of linear hours. Not every daypart is equally valuable, and not every hour should be treated as if it deserves the same level of investment. The real task is to identify which windows still generate outsized audience, advertising, and community value, and then optimize around those. That likely means concentrating resources into live sports, local news, weather, political coverage, major breaking events, and a limited number of branded programming franchises that retain audience significance. Everything else becomes a question of efficiency rather than identity.

Rethinking The Value Of The Broadcast Day

That logic also makes the role of paid programming more strategically interesting than it is usually allowed to be. In most industry discussions, time-bought content is treated as a filler category — something stations tolerate rather than actively deploy. But if the economics of large portions of the linear day are deteriorating, then monetizing lower-value hours more aggressively may be a rational response. Paid programming can function as a financial bridge: it preserves the schedule, generates cash, and avoids the cost burden of original content that no longer produces a sufficient return.

The key point is not that broadcast should abandon entertainment entirely. It is that the industry may need to stop treating broad entertainment as a structural obligation. A show or format should survive because it serves a clear commercial or strategic purpose, not because the legacy grid demands a certain number of hours to be filled. In practice, that could mean fewer expensive originals on broadcast, more experimentation on streaming platforms, and a more disciplined willingness to let linear television focus on the kinds of programming it still does best.

A Smaller Footprint, A Sharper Purpose

This shift would not mark the end of broadcast television. It would mark the end of the assumption that broadcast must remain a comprehensive, all-hours entertainment system. That assumption was sustainable when the audience was larger, the economics were stronger, and the distribution environment was less competitive. It is much less sustainable now.

The more realistic future for broadcast is not a collapse into irrelevance, but a contraction into greater specificity. Broadcast still has meaningful strengths: enviable reach, local trust, live-event power, and a continuing role in the media ecosystem that streaming has not fully replaced. But those strengths are increasingly concentrated in a narrower set of use cases. The question for broadcasters is whether they can build durable businesses around that narrower set without clinging to a model designed for another era.

In that sense, the industry’s real challenge is not how to preserve every part of the linear schedule. It is how to preserve the parts that still matter while shedding the parts that no longer do. The winners will likely be the companies willing to accept that broadcast’s future may be smaller in scale—but sharper in purpose.

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Tim Hanlon

Tim Hanlon is the Founder & CEO of the Chicago-based Vertere Group, LLC – a boutique strategic consulting and advisory firm focused on helping today’s most forward-leaning media companies, brands, entrepreneurs, and investors benefit from rapidly changing technological advances in marketing, media and consumer communications.

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