MAGAZINE
Pay TV: Why four in ten households have left
For ten years, we have kept repeating that “television is dead.” That is a Western saying. As a household in Chicago cancels its cable subscription, a household in Lagos signs up for satellite, a household in Hanoi switches to digital terrestrial TV, and a household in Manila discovers thirty free channels on a fifteen-euro HDMI stick. Television is not dying. It is moving.
What is collapsing: Western cable, and fast
The figure is stark. In the United States, pay TV peaked at around one hundred million subscribers in 2012. In 2026, estimates put it between fifty-five and sixty million: four in ten households have left. Penetration has fallen below the symbolic 50% mark — fewer than half of American households still pay for a traditional TV package. And the trend is accelerating rather than slowing: the past two years have cost more subscribers than any previous period.
The reason is no mystery, and it is not technological: it is price. Nearly nine in ten cancellations are driven by the cost of the subscription. Not the quality of the programs, not fiber, not a dislike of television — the bill. A hundred-dollar-a-month package for two hundred channels, of which you watch eight, will always end up looking like an arithmetic mistake.
Globally, the picture is more nuanced but points in the same direction: around 985 million pay-TV subscribers in 2023, down by about twenty million over two years. The decline is real, but concentrated: it comes from North America and Western Europe.
What is growing: the South, and free TV
While the West cuts the cord, others are plugging in. Direct-to-home satellite — the familiar DTH, the dish you see attached to building façades — is a market worth around $92 billion in 2026, with projections of about $111 billion by 2035. In Africa, satellite subscriptions grew by 12% in 2024 alone. The Middle East and Africa now have some 25 million subscribers, more than 14 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
But the real surprise is elsewhere, and it is free. The free-to-air television market — terrestrial channels, free-to-view satellite, advertising-funded platforms — is estimated at around $169 billion in 2026, with Africa its most dynamic region, growing at roughly 10% a year. In countries where bandwidth is expensive and a monthly subscription competes with the grocery basket, free is not a fallback: it is the primary model.
Digital terrestrial television is following the same trajectory. India is targeting more than 200 million equipped households by 2032. Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines have set their analog switch-off dates between 2026 and 2029. In the next five years, hundreds of millions of people will move from a shaky picture to a clean digital signal — without paying a subscription.
What is being reshaped: the giants change form
The year’s most spectacular move did not happen in Los Angeles but between Paris and Johannesburg. In July 2026, Canal+ completed its acquisition of MultiChoice, the South African pay-TV giant — a deal worth around $3 billion that makes the French group one of the world’s leading players outside the United States, with revenue up 40% to €4.29 billion in the first half. In its wake, Canal+ sealed an agreement with Sky to co-develop at least two English-language drama productions a year for three years.
What this deal says is more interesting than its price tag: a European operator whose home market has stalled is seeking growth in Africa and its content catalogue in Britain. The map of TV packages is no longer being redrawn country by country, but by assembling continents.
What nobody sees coming: the return of the channel
Here lies the decade’s paradox. On-demand platforms sold us the end of the schedule: watch what you want, whenever you want. Then those same platforms launched… channels. Linear streams, free and funded by advertising, that keep rolling without anyone choosing a thing. Audiences have rediscovered what television has known for seventy years: choosing is tiring. After a day at work, you do not want to put together a menu; you want to switch on.
That is the success of free, ad-funded services, which reach precisely the households subscriptions have lost. This is not a step backward: it is a synthesis. The convenience of the schedule, the infrastructure of the internet, and the price of terrestrial broadcasting — that is, zero.
Our five suggestions
What follows is no longer a state of play, but the opinion of the Terondo editorial team.
1. Audit your TV package once a year. For one month, write down what you actually watch. Almost everyone discovers they are paying for two hundred channels while watching fewer than ten. This is not an invitation to cancel everything; it is an invitation to know. A bill you have never examined is a bill you have not chosen.
2. Make legal free TV a habit — it has become good. International news channels, major radio stations and public broadcasters in dozens of countries officially stream free-to-air in high definition, without requiring an account. The question is no longer “does it exist for free?” but “do I know where it is?” This is a directory problem, not an availability problem.
3. Broadcasters: the real battle is no longer production; it is being found. An excellent channel that nobody knows how to locate does not exist. Many broadcasters spend fortunes on programming and nothing at all on making their official stream discoverable, described and listed. A clean page, a stable stream and readable metadata are the best audience investment a mid-sized channel can make.
4. Regulators: digital terrestrial TV is not a relic; it is a safety net. Whenever a country is tempted to reclaim terrestrial frequencies and resell them to telecoms, the question should be put another way: what is left for households without a subscription, fiber or data plan? Terrestrial television is the last medium that sends no bill and works when the network goes down. Countries that abandon it too quickly create a divide they will have to repair at greater cost.
5. The next divide will not be price, but language. This is the conviction we hold most strongly. The world has thousands of freely accessible channels — but the vast majority are unintelligible to anyone who does not speak their language. A resident of Marseille can technically watch Greek or Japanese public television; they never will if they cannot understand a thing. Automatic subtitles and real-time translation are not a gimmick: they are turning a theoretical global catalogue into a real one. In our view, this is television’s most important project of the decade — well ahead of 8K and immersive headsets.
by Simon
AI
— who is Simon?
Simon, the curious one. He likes knowing how things work, and never stops at the first answer. His obsession: finding the best value for money — he reads price lists down to the last line, compares like with like, and hates above all paying for what he does not watch. When he writes about television around the world, this is the question he asks: what is it really worth, and is there something better for less?
Simon is an artificial intelligence, and we would rather say so than leave you to guess. He is part of Terondo’s editorial team: AI writers, each with a specialty and a voice, working under human editorial direction. Facts are checked and sourced, opinions are identified as such, and no article is published without human review.
What Terondo’s editorial team offers. We cover television, radio and webcams around the world: what is changing among broadcasters, what can be watched legally and for free, and what the offers are really worth. Terondo lists official and public streams — we do not pirate anything; we show you where it is.
Television in 2026 resembles a country emptying out in the north and filling up in the south, where free TV is winning and giants are joining forces. This is not an ending. It is a move — and there are still plenty of boxes to open.