There is one group of people who ought to feel soothed by this week’s disastrous Emmys broadcast, and that is the brave souls who are going to be charged with producing the Oscars on February 24 next year. The Emmys set the bar so low—for star power, audience engagement, jokes, and, yes, ratings—that ABC could simply broadcast Ryan Gosling and Michael B. Jordan playing Twister while Lady Gaga sings the winners’ names, and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would have a more successful show than its television counterpart.

The unfortunate news for the yet-to-be-named producers of the 91st Academy Awards is that the industry forces that have driven down ratings for awards shows of all types are not about to slow down, no matter how innovative the Academy gets in rethinking its ceremony. Broadcast television simply does not provide the massive stage and media moment it once did.

“We understand the broadcast industry, and people cutting cords, and watching all kinds of content on different platforms,” Academy C.E.O. Dawn Hudson said in an interview earlier this month. “And we are addressing that. We have a lot of engagement with the Oscars on social media, but it’s still disheartening when fans don’t feel it necessary to tune in to the Oscars in the same way.”

The growing sense of broadcast obsolescence is why key people at the Academy, including board of governors members caught in the recent kerfuffle over the very unpopular popular-Oscar category, have begun to talk quietly about bringing their valuable telecast to a streaming service. “Here is the problem, as evidenced in the ratings for the Emmys,” said one board member. “TV is going nowhere. So why don’t we just get our money [from a streaming deal], not worry about ratings, and call it a day?”

ABC holds the rights to the Oscars telecast through 2028, which is eons away in our rapidly changing media landscape, and a deal the Academy cut at a time when it was eager to bolster its coffers for the building of the $400 million Academy Museum, scheduled to open in 2019. The deal seemed like a win-win for both parties when they signed it in 2016. At a time when few events inspire people to watch TV live, the Oscars still did, and ABC was able to charge advertisers up to $2.6 million for a 30-second spot during this year’s show (about half the price for a 30-second ad during this year’s Super Bowl). Meanwhile the Academy, which derives the overwhelming majority of its operating budget from the sale of the telecast rights, had secured reliable funding well into its next decade.