As US households cross the threshold into streaming-only viewing, the case is made that linear television's last redoubt is not habit or convenience but trust, and that trust, not content, is the only differentiator left in a fragmented media landscape.
Earlier this year my household switched to internet only. No aerial, no cable box, no more channel numbers to memorize. It felt less like a technology decision than a small funeral, and the thing I miss most is not any particular program but the coffee machine conversation that used to follow it. Everyone had watched the same thing over the weekend, so Monday morning had a shared script. That script is gone, except for one stubborn category: news, and the big live event.
The new figures from the Advertising Research Foundation give the trend a number. In the United States, 30.5 per cent of households now receive their television exclusively through streaming, up from 29.5 per cent a year earlier. A single percentage point does not sound dramatic until you notice the direction has not reversed once in years of measurement. RTL Group’s streaming subscriptions grew 20 per cent to 8.7 million, and advertising money is following the audience: spending on streaming ads across Europe rose almost 60 per cent in 2025. Meanwhile Dutch viewers, according to Telecompaper, are watching less video overall, not more. The pie is not just being redivided, it is shrinking, and linear gets the smaller remaining slice.
What survives the shrinking
What is curious is not that linear television is fading. Everyone with a teenage child or a functioning internet connection already knew that. What is curious is what refuses to fade. Sport, elections, breaking news, a royal funeral, a papal announcement - these still pull people toward a live broadcast at a fixed hour, on a channel someone else chose. Why would anyone bother, when the same footage will be on every platform within minutes, clipped and captioned and ready for asynchronous consumption?
A memory comes back to me from my years at Hart van Nederland, when SBS6 was still finding its feet against the established broadcasters. On a national day of remembrance we broadcast the two minutes of silence, exactly as NOS and RTL did. Same silence, same clock, same essentially uneventful two minutes. Yet NOS pulled the largest audience by a wide margin, even though there was, strictly speaking, nothing to differentiate the product. People had a choice between three identical services and voted overwhelmingly for the one they trusted to hold that silence with the right gravity. That is not a small footnote from a fading industry. It may be the whole explanation for why linear survives at all, in whatever corner it still occupies.
Trust as the last scarce resource
Streaming has solved distribution. Anyone can put video in front of anyone else, anywhere, at any hour, and the ARF numbers suggest that solution is winning by a wide margin. What streaming has not solved, and arguably cannot solve through better recommendation algorithms or sharper production values, is the question of whom to believe when something actually matters. Content has become abundant to the point of being nearly free. Trust has not.
This has an uncomfortable implication for anyone building a media organization today, Christian or otherwise: chasing reach through more platforms and more content is chasing the wrong scarcity. The real asset is being the outlet someone reflexively turns to when the stakes are momentarily real - not because the coverage will be different from the neighbor’s, but because it will be theirs. Segmentation was supposed to be the great threat to legacy media. It has turned out to be almost the opposite. In a landscape splintered into a thousand feeds, the audience still, on occasion, wants to gather, and it gathers around whoever it trusts to narrate the moment honestly. Everything else is inventory. That is worth remembering long after the last aerial comes down.