What Will TV Be Like in 2026? (And Beyond!)

CNBC recently sat down with a dozen senior figures in the TV industry and asked them a series of questions about just where they think that industry--and the experience it provides the consumer--is going, and published a "sampling" of the answers.

Going by what they published there was no consensus--the guesses these figures offered varying greatly. Candle Media CEO Kevin Mayer, for example, in response to the question of where "legacy TV" would be in three years held it to be in its "death throes"--while the rest were generally less pessimistic, with The Ringer founder Bill Simmons suggesting that instead TV, like radio, will linger on.

Still, it seems possible to distill the assorted answers into the following: regular, legacy TV will still be around, the content it produces from dwindling budgets watched by a dwindling, aging viewership, and kept alive by news and sports (the high fees charged by which are yet another reason why there is less to fund other stuff). It is also likely to have help from its syndication earnings, and the very same streaming which is its rival, as this has, of course, been having its own problems funding content (as those who have seen the drama at Netflix, Disney+, Warner Bros. Discovery, are all aware). Indeed, streaming is likely to need help from legacy TV with content funding, and at the same time to increasingly sell its content to legacy TV, while there is likely to be consolidation both in legacy TV and streaming, with failures and mergers thinning out the ranks; and some aggregation, too, though as Barry Diller put it, the customer getting the convenience of "[o]ne central warehouse who deals with all the players and sends one bill" is unlikely.

The vision seems fairly plausible, but also fairly safe (reflecting, I think, more guarded expectations regarding streaming compared with the bullishness of a couple of years ago when people fancied streaming replacing theaters, etc.). Still, there are a few more exotic predictions in there--among them, the integration of betting into sports viewing (gamblers placing bets through their remotes using voice command), artificial intelligence (AI) facilitating the subbing and dubbing of content to make it easily marketable internationally ("without a third-party dubbing it for you"), and most exotic of all, the viewer getting a measure of editorial control over some of the content (citing Netflix's Kaleidoscope as an example).

What are we to make of these last? I suspect it will take a lot more states legalizing sports betting--and specifically online sports betting--to make the kind of technological set-up that former CNN President Jeff Zucker envisions worthwhile for the relevant businesses (though they may, of course, bet on this happening in short order). I think it will probably be a fair while before AI does much to speed along the subbing/dubbing process--and that if we had AI that could dub shows effectively, we might see AI not only replace a great deal of staff in this area (the dubbing business is not an unimportant source of jobs for actors, writers, directors, etc.), but perhaps more broadly take over the voicing of, for example, animation (which, along with other advances, might enable fans to easily and cheaply create their own). But I think that far from becoming a significant new way to watch customizable narratives (an idea we saw tried before on DVD, where you could include or exclude a few scenes out of the running time) it is likely to remain a gimmick for a very long time to come because that is simply not how storytelling works.