Live broadcast TV has plummeted to 44% of consumption on televisions at the end of last year, down from 60% five years earlier, according to new research from Parks Associates. The research firm said that the broadcast TV decline continues in 2018, with broadcast television accounting for only 42% of all video consumption on TV by the end of the third quarter of 2018 as consumers continue to shift to over-the-top (OTT) services.

According to the newly released Parks Associates whitepaper, by 2022, there will be only 103 million pay-TV subscribers in North America.

Broadcast TV Decline

Other findings from the whitepaper include:

OTT video service cancellation rate remains stable at 18%.

Millennials are the largest consumers of OTT services, with more than 85% of U.S. millennials subscribing to at least one OTT service.

In five years, more than 265 million households worldwide will have more than 400 million OTT video service subscriptions.

“While OTT SVOD has significantly changed viewing patterns among consumers, live video is far from dead,” said Brett Sappington, Parks Associates senior director of research, in a prepared statement. “We still see massive spikes in viewership for live events. However, an increasing amount of live viewership is on connected devices. Change does not come easily, but the scale of disruption in the video industry requires traditional pay-TV providers to address their business and service strategies in a new way. New strategies include delivering video to mobile phones and transitioning live video to online sources.”