Once a fixture in 90% of all U.S. TV homes, penetration of the traditional “cable” bundle has been whittled down to less than one-third (31%) of the national base, as subscriptions dropped another 10% in the second quarter to 40.1 million households.

Per MoffettNathanson estimates, some 31 million customers have parted ways with their legacy cable/satellite/telco-TV providers in the last five years, which translates to a 44% drop. Zoom out to Q2 of 2016, when 97.3 million households subscribed to the bundle, and the cumulative 10-year churn works out to a net loss of 57.2 million subs (-59%).

If live sports are the only thing preventing the bundle from vanishing outright, a stable virtual MVPD market has gone a long way toward moderating the overall losses in the pay-TV space. When subscriptions to vMVPD platforms such as YouTube TV, Sling TV and Hulu/Fubo are factored into the mix, the tally of premium video customers is a more robust 61.5 million, good for a penetration rate of 48%.

Blending the bundled subs with their “skinny bundle” counterparts reduces the overall Q2 pay-TV churn to -4.6% versus the year-ago period. That said, growth in the vMVPD category has ground to a near standstill, with the alternative platforms notching a sequential gain of just 68,000 subs in the quarter. Concerns about this recent deceleration aside, a slight quarter-to-quarter boost is obviously preferable to the bundle’s comparable loss of 953,000 customers between the first and second quarters of this year.

If vMVPD growth is no longer seen as sufficiently compensatory for the snowballing losses among the legacy pay-TV players, MoffettNathanson analysts believe the steep declines of the last five years will level out by the close of the decade. The firm projects the market will reach a floor of some 53 million subs in 2030, with traditional operators accounting for 27 million video customers—just slightly more than the 26 million subs the vMVPDs are expected to reach in four years’ time.

The analysts emphasized that their projections do not “capture incremental subscribers from the likes of ESPN Unlimited or Fox One,” although the current combined reach for those direct-to-consumer platforms is thus far relatively limited. Still, any gains made on the DTC front are cause for celebration, given the ongoing defections in the linear pay-TV business.

Per this month’s Nielsen universe estimates, ESPN’s signal now reaches 53.6 million homes, down from 59 million at the beginning of 2026, while FS1 is down to 51.8 million homes. At the cable bundle’s peak, the ESPN feed was beamed into just shy of 103 million U.S. households.

How pay-TV fares after 2030 largely will depend on the linear networks’ ability to retain the rights to top-tier sporting events. While trad TV remains the primary destination for sports fans, MoffettNathanson’s long-term outlook suggests it will soon be next to impossible to make any meaningful distinctions between old-school TV and its digital usurpers.

“We’re closer to the end of this story than the beginning,” analyst Craig Moffett wrote as a coda to the company’s latest cord-cutting report. “Networks are an unnecessary layer of the value chain and are unmistakably on their way out. Their brand names have some modest residual value but their original purpose—organizing content into a schedule—is entirely anachronistic today. As networks fade, the lines between streaming and linear are getting fuzzier.”