The American media landscape has officially crossed the Rubicon, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence’s annual Economics of Basic Cable report from its Kagan research unit. It’s a grim read.
The U.S. cable network industry has formally entered the “decline stage of its life cycle,” a transition defined by falling revenues, shrinking viewership, and an unprecedented restructuring of legacy assets. While the sector faces a tough financial trajectory, the defining event is the high-stakes bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), where streaming giant Netflix. and traditional powerhouse Paramount Skydance present two starkly different paths for the future of cable television.
The inflection point identified in the 2025 report is not a sudden crash, but rather a structural dismantling of the cable bundle that dominated entertainment for decades. The WBD negotiations encapsulate this shift. While Paramount Skydance aims to acquire the company in its entirety, Netflix is bidding solely for WBD’s film studio and streaming assets. Should Netflix prevail, WBD’s cable assets would be split off, effectively stranding the linear networks as the industry leader cannibalizes the content engine for its digital platform.
“These decisions signify a shift in the media industry as companies abandon cable networks in favor of streaming services,” wrote S&P’s Scott Robson, who also noted that the “burgeoning free ad-supported television (FAST) industry also continues to evolve as owners of library video content increasingly look for monetization outlets outside of basic cable syndication.”
Since the “cord-cutting” movement ushered in by Netflix gathered steam, Robson noted that linear network TV has been under pressure—subscriptions peaked all the way back in 2012. Looking back at 2025 now, he concluded, there’s no comeback in sight.
Mapping out the decline ahead
This potential fracturing of WBD mirrors broader industry movements. Comcast is set to finalize the spinoff of its cable networks—excluding Bravo—into a standalone entity named “Versant” on January 2, 2026. These strategic exits signal that major media conglomerates are now willing to “abandon cable networks in favor of streaming services,” a trend accelerated by the August 2025 launches of the ESPN Unlimited and FOX One streaming platforms, according to S&P.
The financial data underpinning this migration is stark. In 2024, gross advertising revenue for cable networks fell 5.9% to $20.2 billion, the lowest level recorded since 2007. Robson’s team also estimated that affiliate fee revenue, or what TV operators pay to carry cable operators, fell nearly 3% to roughly $38.7 billion. Perhaps most telling is the subscriber metric: the average cable network saw its subscriber base erode by 7.1% to 31.4 million homes.
However, S&P emphasized that this “decline stage” forecasts a long, slow bleedout rather than a precipitous fall. “After digesting all the major events that took place in 2025, it is clear that the industry has reached a turning point,” Robson wrote. “That being said, our outlook does not call for a major collapse but rather a continued slow decline as the transition to streaming develops.”
S&P noted that despite the overarching downward trend, the rate of pay TV subscription decline appeared to slow in 2025, with the industry actually registering slight subscriber growth in the third quarter.
Operators are attempting to manage this descent by clinging to the industry’s last reliable life raft: live sports. The year 2026 looms large, featuring both the Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup. Comcast has even relaunched NBCSN, packaging it into a sports-centric bundle on YouTube TV to capture viewers who haven’t yet migrated to its Peacock streaming service.
A separate S&P analysis concluded that sports may no longer be a moat for the declining linear TV business. “Live sports may not be the anchor that once kept consumers from cutting the video cord,” S&P’s Keith Nissen wrote.
Nissen cited an S&P survey that found 90% of households dropping traditional pay TV for sports over the past year were sports fans, and nearly two-thirds of them spent five or more hours per week watching sports. “This serves as evidence that access to live sports is no longer a differentiator between traditional and virtual multichannel services.”
Robson warned that the friction between rising costs and falling value has intensified, with 2025 marred by carriage disputes, including blackouts of Walt Disney and TelevisaUnivision networks on YouTube TV, as distributors pushed back against rising rates for diminishing audiences.
As 2026 approaches, the industry outlook is one where underperforming networks face relegation to expensive tiers or outright closure.
The situation is akin to an estate sale for a once-grand mansion. The owners (media conglomerates) are systematically selling off the furniture (cable networks) and moving the most valuable heirlooms (premium content and sports rights) into a modern apartment across town (streaming), leaving the old house to slowly empty out, room by room.
Editor’s note: The author worked for Netflix from June 2024 through July 2025.
OpenAI is looking for a new employee to help address the growing dangers of AI, and the tech company is willing to spend more than half a million dollars to fill the role.
OpenAI is hiring a “head of preparedness” to reduce harms associated with the technology, like user mental health and cybersecurity, CEO Sam Altman wrote in an X post on Saturday. The position will pay $555,000 per year, plus equity, according to the job listing.
“This will be a stressful job and you’ll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately,” Altman said.
OpenAI’s push to hire a safety executive comes amid companies’ growing concerns about AI risks on operations and reputations. A November analysis of annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings by financial data and analytics company AlphaSense found that in the first 11 months of the year, 418 companies worth at least $1 billion cited reputational harm associated with AI risk factors. These reputation-threatening risks include AI datasets that show biased information or jeopardize security. Reports of AI-related reputational harm increased 46% from 2024, according to the analysis.
“Models are improving quickly and are now capable of many great things, but they are also starting to present some real challenges,” Altman said in the social media post.
“If you want to help the world figure out how to enable cybersecurity defenders with cutting edge capabilities while ensuring attackers can’t use them for harm, ideally by making all systems more secure, and similarly for how we release biological capabilities and even gain confidence in the safety of running systems that can self-improve, please consider applying,” he added.
OpenAI’s previous head of preparedness Aleksander Madry was reassigned last year to a role related to AI reasoning, with AI safety a related part of the job.
OpenAI’s efforts to address AI dangers
Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit with the intention to use AI to improve and benefit humanity, OpenAI has, in the eyes of some of its former leaders, struggled to prioritize its commitment to safe technology development. The company’s former vice president of research, Dario Amodei, along with his sister Daniela Amodei and several other researchers, left OpenAI in 2020, in part because of concerns the company was prioritizing commercial success over safety. Amodei founded Anthropic the following year.
OpenAI has faced multiple wrongful death lawsuits this year, alleging ChatGPT encouraged users’ delusions, and claiming conversations with the bot were linked to some users’ suicides. A New York Times investigation published in November found nearly 50 cases of ChatGPT users having mental health crises while in conversation with the bot.
OpenAI said in August its safety features could “degrade” following long conversations between users and ChatGPT, but the company has made changes to improve how its models interact with users. It created an eight-person council earlier this year to advise the company on guardrails to support users’ wellbeing and has updated ChatGPT to better respond in sensitive conversations and increase access to crisis hotlines. At the beginning of the month, the company announced grants to fund research about the intersection of AI and mental health.
The tech company has also conceded to needing improved safety measures, saying in a blog post this month some of its upcoming models could present a “high” cybersecurity risk as AI rapidly advances. The company is taking measures—such as training models to not respond to requests compromising cybersecurity and refining monitoring systems—to mitigate those risks.
“We have a strong foundation of measuring growing capabilities,” Altman wrote on Saturday. “But we are entering a world where we need more nuanced understanding and measurement of how those capabilities could be abused, and how we can limit those downsides both in our products and in the world, in a way that lets us all enjoy the tremendous benefits.”
YouTube cofounder Steve Chen is one of the latest tech trailblazers to warn against social media’s impact on kids. Chen warned in a talk short-form video “equates to shorter attention spans” and said he wouldn’t want his own kids to exclusively consume this type of content. Companies that distribute short-form video (which includes the company he cofounded, YouTube) should add safeguards for younger users, he added.
A YouTube cofounder who helped pave the way for our modern, content-obsessed world is the latest tech whiz to come out against short-form videos because of their effects on kids.
Steve Chen, who served as YouTube’s former chief technology officer before it was acquired by Google in 2006, railed against the TikTok-ification of online life in a talk earlier this year at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“I think TikTok is entertainment, but it’s purely entertainment,” Chen said during the talk, which was published on YouTube Friday. “It’s just for that moment. Just shorter-form content equates to shorter attention spans.”
Chen, who has two children with wife, Jamie Chen, said he wouldn’t want his kids only consuming short-form content, and then not be able to watch something longer than 15 minutes. He said he knows of other parents who force their kids to watch longer videos without the eye-catching colors and gimmicks that hook especially younger users. This strategy works well, he claims.
“If they don’t get exposure to the short-form content right away, then they’re still happy with that other type of content that they’re watching,” he said.
Many companies have had to rush to offer short-form content after the rise of TikTok, he said, but these companies now have to balance their motivations for monetization and attracting users’ attention with content that’s “actually useful.”
Companies that distribute short-form video, which includes his former company YouTube, could face problems with addictiveness. These companies should add safeguards for kids on short-form content, such as age restrictions for apps and limits on the amount of time some users can use them, he said.
Chen joins fellow tech trailblazers Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk in sounding the alarm about social media’s impact on children. In a podcast interview, Altman specifically called out social media scrolling and the “dopamine hit” of short-form video for “probably messing with kids’ brain development in a super deep way.”
Musk, who owns the social network X (née Twitter), said in 2023 he doesn’t have any restrictions on social-media use for his children, but added this “might have been a mistake,” and encouraged parents to take a more active role in their kids’ social-media habits.
“I think, probably, I would limit social media a bit more than I have in the past and just take note of what they’re watching, because I think at this point they’re being programmed by some social media algorithms, which you may or may not agree with,” Musk said.
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on July 29, 2025.
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A stark new economic analysis reveals the Trump administration’s trade policies are extracting a heavy toll from Main Street, with small-business importers paying approximately $25,000 more per month in tariff costs since April 2025. The report, published Dec. 17 by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a left-wing think tank, details how a “chaotic approach” to trade and the elimination of key import exceptions have created a financial crisis for entrepreneurs during the critical holiday season.
According to the analysis by Michael Negron and Mimla Wardak, the administration’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement triggered a sharp increase in duties collected from American businesses. From April through September 2025, CAP estimated, the roughly 236,000 small-business importers in the U.S. paid an average of more than $151,000 in additional tariffs compared to the same period in 2024. (CAP cited the centrist Chamber of Commerce’s research on the small-business importer sector of the economy.)
“The Trump administration’s broad, costly, and frequently shifting policies threaten to undermine one of the strongest engines of the American economy,” Negron said in a statement to Fortune. “A season of opportunity for small businesses has turned into one of uncertainty.”
The burden is not limited to larger enterprises. The report found “mom-and-pop” businesses—those with fewer than 50 employees—paid, on average, over $86,000 more per business during this six-month window than they did the previous year. The outlook for the immediate future is equally grim: CAP projects that if current monthly costs persist, the typical small business will face a tariff bill exceeding $500,000 in 2026, potentially resulting in additional layoffs, bankruptcies, and delayed investments. For the holidays, CAP concludes the tariffs are a “costly lump of coal” in American small business’ collective, proverbial Christmas stocking.
Administrative red tape stifles growth
Beyond direct financial costs, small business owners are struggling with a sudden increase in bureaucratic red tape. The administration eliminated the de minimis exception, which previously allowed low-value shipments to enter the U.S. without duties or extensive paperwork. This policy change has forced businesses to prepay new tariff rates and complete complex customs forms for millions of shipments that were formerly exempt.
Jyoti Jaiswal, founder of OMSutra, a small business selling sustainable fashion and home goods, told CAP the changes have forced her to consolidate shipments and block more capital upfront. Jaiswal noted her company now spends 10 to 15 hours on tariff-related administrative work per shipment, up from eight to 10 hours previously, preventing her from passing costs on to consumers without losing competitiveness.
Similarly, Legrand Lindor, CEO of LMI Textiles, told CAP his medical supply company went from spending zero time on tariff paperwork to spending four to five hours per transaction. Facing a 20% increase in product costs—roughly $80,000 in additional spending—Lindor was forced to scrap plans to open a new warehouse in 2025.
The rising costs appear to be cooling the labor market for small firms. Data from payroll provider ADP shows that businesses with fewer than 50 employees laid off 120,000 workers in November 2025, the highest number of small-business layoffs in five years.
While the administration claimed foreign nations would pay these costs, the report emphasizes tariffs are taxes paid by American importers. Goldman Sachs calculated that of August 2025, businesses had absorbed 51% of the cost of tariffs, though they had passed 37% onto consumers through higher prices. A survey by Small Business Majority from late 2025 indicated 74% of small-business owners are now worried about their business surviving the next 12 months.
Compounding financial pressures
The tariff crisis coincides with other financial headwinds. The report highlights the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits in 2026 threatens to double premiums for millions of entrepreneurs and small-business employees.
With the holiday season typically accounting for at least one-quarter of annual revenue for retailers, the convergence of high tariffs and administrative confusion has delivered what the report describes as “a decidedly unhappy holiday season” for the nation’s 236,000 small-business importers. Without a change in policy, these businesses face the prospect of escalating costs and reduced investment heading into the new year.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
Politics8 years ago