Television isn’t dying. It’s already dead.
For generations, broadcast television was the cultural center of gravity. If a moment mattered, it happened live on TV. The Oscars weren’t just an awards show, they were a national event, a shared experience that pulled tens of millions of eyes at once.
Those days are gone.
In 1998, the Academy Awards drew more than 57 million television viewers. That wasn’t niche success. That was cultural dominance. Nearly one in four Americans with a TV was watching the same thing at the same time.
By 2025, the Oscars struggled to reach around 19–20 million total viewers, and that figure includes streaming and mobile viewing. The number of people watching on traditional broadcast television is significantly lower.
That’s not a dip. That’s a collapse.
Television no longer controls attention, culture, or relevance. The shared experience it once monopolized has splintered into millions of feeds, clips, reaction videos, and algorithmic timelines.
Awards shows didn’t lose relevance because of bad hosts or weak nominees. They lost relevance because the medium that once amplified them lost its grip.
By 2025, streaming accounts for roughly 45% of all U.S. viewing time, surpassing broadcast and cable combined. Broadcast television now represents around 20% of total viewing and continues to shrink every quarter.
Live television viewership in key demographics has fallen between 18% and 30% year-over-year across major networks. More than a quarter of Americans no longer watch live television at all. Culture is now consumed through clips, feeds, social platforms, or not at all.
Television’s power was always communal. Millions watching together. One moment. One conversation the next day.
Social platforms replaced that with something more powerful, personal attention. Audiences don’t gather for appointment viewing anymore. They collide with content. They don’t watch the Oscars. They scroll past the winners in highlights, memes, and reactions.
A three-hour broadcast cannot compete with a world where cultural relevance is measured in seconds.
So when legacy institutions abandon broadcast, it isn’t innovation. It’s surrender. Audiences already voted with their attention. And television lost.
