Your cable box is officially a relic. And honestly? It’s been a long time coming.
New data from Ampere Analysis confirms what most of us have suspected for years: streaming platforms have overtaken traditional broadcasters in content spending for the first time ever. That’s not a typo. The streamers — Netflix , Disney+ , Prime Video, Max, Apple TV+ — are now outspending the entire traditional TV industry. And 2026 is shaping up to be even more brutal for the old guard.
Let’s talk numbers, because they’re pretty staggering. Streamers are expected to pump a jaw-dropping $101 billion into content this year, marking a 6% jump from 2025. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly 40% of all global content spending. Four out of every ten dollars being spent on TV shows and movies worldwide is coming from streaming services. That’s insane when you think about how young this industry really is.
Meanwhile, the traditional players are struggling to keep up. Pay TV operators, commercial broadcasters, and even public broadcasters are looking at stagnant or outright declining budgets heading into 2026. The reasons aren’t exactly surprising — advertising revenue keeps taking hits, production costs won’t stop climbing, and viewers just aren’t watching linear TV the way they used to. It’s a perfect storm, and traditional networks are caught right in the middle of it.
Live Sports are no longer keeping consumers on traditional TV
What’s particularly brutal here is what’s happening with sports. For years, live sports has been the one thing keeping people tethered to their cable subscriptions. It was the ace up traditional TV’s sleeve. But that’s changing fast.
Prime Video has locked up major NBA rights extending through 2026, and Peacock and Max are handling Winter Olympics coverage. The World Cup is coming to L.A. this year too, and you better believe the streamers are going to be all over it. The last real moat that cable TV had is being systematically drained by companies with deeper pockets and longer time horizons.
The situation is especially dire in the United States, where commercial broadcasters are actively slashing their content budgets. And here’s the kicker — it’s often their own parent companies doing the cutting. Studio groups are redirecting those dollars toward their proprietary streaming services instead. They’re essentially cannibalizing their own linear networks to feed their streaming operations. It’s a calculated bet that the future is streaming, and traditional TV is just there to be harvested for parts.
Broadcasters outside the U.S. are showing a bit more resilience, managing to keep investment levels relatively stable. But let’s be clear — stable isn’t growth. It’s survival mode. These networks aren’t expanding or taking risks. They’re just trying to hold on while the streamers gobble up market share around them.
Total global content investment will hit $255 billion in 2026, according to Ampere’s projections. That’s only a 2% increase year-over-year, which sounds modest on the surface. But that topline number hides a much more dramatic story underneath. The pie is growing slowly, but who’s eating it is changing rapidly. Streamers are grabbing bigger and bigger slices while everyone else fights over the crumbs.
Peter Ingram, research manager at Ampere Analysis, summed it up pretty well: “The accelerating shift in content investment toward streaming underscores a structural rebalancing of the global TV market, with scale and reach emerging as the central competitive differentiators for operators to remain buoyant.”
Translation? If you’re not big enough to compete globally, you’re probably going to get left behind.
Traditional TV isn’t dead yet. But it’s definitely on life support. And the companies holding the plug are the same ones building streaming empires.
