Jeff Zucker predicts there’s no ‘floor’ to bundle subscribers as sports rights flee cable

Jeff Zucker’s career ascended over the same period the cable bundle took off. Now, he’s predicting its demise.

Zucker, who served as the chief executive at both NBCUniversal and CNN during his career in television, knows better than most just how valuable that cable bundle used to be, and still is. Somewhere around 62 million households still subscribe to a cable, satellite, or digital television bundle, according to the latest estimates. That’s nowhere close to the over 100 million subscribers the pay-TV bundle attracted at its peak, but it’s also far from the hospice-like characterization that many describe when talking about the bundle’s decline.

The questions regarding the bundle are the same as they have been for years. How quickly will the decline come? And is there a “floor” of sorts where subscriber figures will bottom out?

There are some early signs that the decline could be slowing, though the bundle still sheds millions of subscribers with each passing year. But as for that second question, whether or not a floor exists, the prediction from many that the bundle’s decline might eventually flatten out at some lower, undetermined figure appears to be less popular as the bundle continues to shed households.

Jeff Zucker is among those who believe there might not be a floor. In a media executive roundtable with CNBC, Zucker suggested the declines will likely continue and tied the reason directly to sports rights.

“I don’t think we’ll have a floor,” Zucker said. “I do think it will continue to decline, and it’ll probably do so every year until sports rights eventually disappear from cable. But I think that’s at least a decade off.”

It’s no secret that many of the remaining bundle subscribers are sports fans. As live sports continue to fragment between cable, streaming, and broadcast television, the bundle — some of which are beginning to include access to certain streaming services that also carry live sports — remains the best option for sports fans who want access to everything.

But it’s also true that live sports are increasingly moving off of cable. The NBA, for instance, just began a new set of deals that considerably changed the mix of where games are broadcast, shifting from a cable-heavy presence to one that relies primarily on broadcast television and streaming. MLB made a similar, albeit less dramatic, shift towards broadcast this season with Sunday Night Baseball moving from ESPN to NBC. Not to mention, many teams across MLB, the NBA, and the NHL have shifted local broadcasts to some mix of streaming and broadcast.

The more live sports move off of cable, the less incentive there is for people to remain cable subscribers.

That said, Zucker’s guess of cable’s full demise being “at least a decade off” seems pretty reasonable. There are still a ton of rights deals that will keep sports on cable well into the 2030s. The NBA has a package of games on ESPN through 2036. The NCAA Tournament will be partly on TNT Sports through 2032. ESPN’s deal with the SEC runs through 2034. The list goes on.

There will still be enough sports on cable to keep fans around for years to come. But there seems to be an expiration date on leagues’ willingness to keep their programming on an ever-shrinking platform, which is part of why properties continue to move to streaming.

Thus we have a self-perpetuating cycle.

So Zucker is probably right that there’s no floor to the cable bundle. The question is about the rate of decline and whether leagues and their media partners can do anything to replicate or approximate the bundle in a post-linear world.

There’s still a lot of the story left to be written about the pay-TV bundle, even on its journey towards zero subscribers.