Behind the Numbers: Forecasting Trends for 2025—Digital Pay-TV Petering Out and Why Livestream Shopping is (and Isn't) Taking Off

Audio by Marcus Johnson, Ethan Cramer-Flood, and Oscar Orozco | Jan 24, 2025

Episode Transcript:

Marcus Johnson:

Hey, gang. It's Friday, January 24th. Ethan, Oscar, and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, an EMARKETER video podcast. I'm Marcus. Today we'll be discussing why live TV is disappearing and whether live stream shopping is actually catching on. Today, I'm joined by two gents, both based in New York City. One of them is coming to us live from our studio, he's senior director of forecasting, it's Oscar Orozco.

Oscar Orozco:

Hello everybody. Hello listeners. Happy New Year, by the way. I don't know how much longer I can say that.

Marcus Johnson:

January 24th?

Oscar Orozco:

Yeah, I don't know how much longer, but-

Marcus Johnson:

Two weeks ago was your deadline.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Yeah. Yeah. You're past the line.

Oscar Orozco:

I think I can go till February with it. So Happy New Year.

Marcus Johnson:

Happy New Year. If I catch you telling me that in July, we are no longer friends. Principal forecasting writer is also joining us. It's Ethan Cramer-Flood.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I am also here.

Marcus Johnson:

Hello. That was also an awkward, that's a tough intro. Let's see if it gets better. Today's fact, who designed the world's most valuable brand logo? It's Apple, according to Forbes, valued at $240 billion. Rob Janoff, the graphic designer at Regis McKenna, which is the agency that handled Apple's startup, came up with a logo. The only direction he got from Steve Jobs was to, he said, "Don't make it cute." The bite in the apple was added to distinguish it from a cherry, because it's got a little stalk at the top as well, as a metaphor for the knowledge users would gain from the computer. And Mr. Janoff's creative director later, after he designed the logo, later pointed out that serendipitously the word byte with a Y is also a computer term, which is pretty cool.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

How lucky.

Oscar Orozco:

Clever. I like it more after hearing the story.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I think there's a story out there about the Nike Swoosh, also, in general, a lot of these iconic images were created by folks who were just doing their job.

Marcus Johnson:

The amount of money that that person was paid to me was the story there. So Nike's logo is the 30th most valuable brand and it's like $40 billion or something. Back in 1971, Phil Knight, who's co-founder of Nike, pays Carolyn Davidson $35-

Oscar Orozco:

I didn't know.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Oh, yeah. There you go.

Marcus Johnson:

To create the Nike Swoosh.

Oscar Orozco:

And it is the most iconic, I think, personally.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah. Quickly going back to the Apple one, another interesting factoid. The original rainbow stripes in the logo were because the Apple computer was the only one that could show images in color. Yeah, many iterations away from that. However, this is the great Behind the Numbers Takeoff forecasting trends and predictions for 2025. It's Great British Bake Off style show. For today's episode in which our takers, or bakers, will be cooking up one trend each for you. Three rounds. Signature take, the How It Will Technically Play Out challenge, and the Showstopping Argument. Let's mute the contestants' predictions. Ethan, what will you be cooking up for us today?

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I will be talking about digital pay TV and how it is unlikely to live up to its promise and as a result, the decline of linear TV will continue.

Marcus Johnson:

Okay. And Oscar, what will you be baking?

Oscar Orozco:

Interesting. Well, I'll be talking about live-streaming e-commerce, something that seems to be on the fringes of American consumers' minds these days, but that I think is going to get increasingly popular starting this year. And yeah, we'll talk a little bit about our new, it's a brand new forecast on the topic.

Marcus Johnson:

Oh, very good. Let's get into it, gents. Round one is Signature Take. Our chefs will have one minute to explain the premise of their trend. We will start with Ethan. He's talking about digital pay TV surge petering out. Tell us more.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Yeah, so we, like everyone else in this business, has been tracking very carefully the decline of traditional TV for a long time. So in this case, traditional pay TV, which we could just call cable TV. People have been bailing on cable TV for a long time. That is not my big surprise revelation today. But what was interesting about that story is that even though you have been hearing about how cord cutters have been growing and growing and growing, and eventually we had to invent this new term, cord nevers, about people who they just skipped right over the part where you pay for cable TV and then eventually cancel, and how cord cutters and cord nevers collectively were growing and growing and people aren't watching pay TV, people aren't watching TV. And we had this pivot point a few years ago where the number of cord cutters and cord nevers exceeded the number of people with cable TV.

And that was a jarring moment in theory, but it wasn't really true at the time from the perspective of the TV industry or from the perspective of advertisers and consumers because people were still watching a lot of TV. They were just doing it digitally.

Marcus Johnson:

Right.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

And so we had this interesting new phenomenon where digital pay TV, which for a while was called the vMVPDs, virtual multi-channel programming, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's basically YouTube TV, Hulu with Live TV, Fubo, people are paying to have the cable TV experience digitally. And we had categorized that as a digital media phenomenon because it is basically streaming. And so we're saying, oh, well this is part of the digital revolution. The death of TV continues. But in reality, that experience was exactly like watching pay TV. You're paying for cable TV, you're getting all the channels, all those people out there that produce TV show, that's all going the same way and you're seeing it. And for a while there that was really going like gangbusters. So much so, that in fact the majority of this country through last year still had pay TV. It's just a whole bunch of them were doing it digitally, they still are.

And you have the remnants of folks that are paying for traditional cable and satellite TV and you have all these new folks that are paying for digital pay TV. And it was a quiet reality that most households in this country still actually had pay TV. That has now come to an end, and this is my statement, this is my forecast because the digital pay TV phenomenon that was explosively successful for a few years there is starting to peter out. It's really expensive. People aren't gravitating towards it as fast as would be necessary to rescue the traditional linear TV industry. And as of 2025, we have now fully and completely reached the point where the majority of America does not have pay TV. So if you add up the digital people and the traditional people, they do not come to the same total as the amount of people that just have nothing, or no pay TV.

Marcus Johnson:

That wasn't even close to a minute. You left your dish in far too long and is burnt as a result. But you make good points. And it's interesting because the gap between any kind of pay TV households and non-pay TV households is widening very quickly. It's gone from 5 million more pay TV households last year to 5 million more non-pay TV households this year. So a 10 million household swing in the non-pay TV direction. So it's moving quickly. I think it's like a 30 million household gap in a couple of years.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Yeah, the gap is going to be enormous. The story is over.

Marcus Johnson:

Oscar, let's turn to you. As livestream e-commerce catching on, apparently. Tell us more.

Oscar Orozco:

Yes. Well, it's something that, for example, it wasn't in my purview about a year ago. It's something I wasn't thinking about really. And as I mentioned a brand new forecast, we've realized that there are over 40 million, already 40 million Americans that have shopped or bought an item through one of these live stream profiles or through a social platform that is hosting one of these events. That was actually last year. So we expect that by next year, 2026, that number will go up to 54 million. In three years, it'll be up to 60 million. So there's a ton of growth there.

To put it into perspective, we talk a lot more about social commerce, and social commerce, we expect that the growth in social buyers, people who are buying on these platforms, will be under 4% growth this year. When you look at live-streaming e-commerce buying, it's at over 19%. So again, a lot of conversation about social commerce is what we talk about more frequently here at EMARKETER. But live-streaming e-commerce is just something that is there. It's growing. We're going to hear a lot more about it and I think it's something we need to talk more about. So, yeah.

Marcus Johnson:

So before we get to round two, quick pushback. The number of live-stream shoppers, it did make a significant jump from last year.

Oscar Orozco:

It has.

Marcus Johnson:

It grew 29%, I think it was, last year. However, we do have it slowing down quite quickly, right? In two years time, it's going to be about 7% growth. So it does seem like it's reached a pretty significant milestone. You get to 50 plus million people doing anything, that's not nothing, but it does seem from our forecast that it is going to slow down and hit the high single digits quite quickly.

Oscar Orozco:

I mean, I think it's fair to look at it from that angle. I mean, I would also push back and say, tell me the last buying or e-commerce behavior activity that has not only seen this growth that we've been seeing the last few years, but that will continue on into the future there. I think a lot of this is not just the Gen Z-ers, but we're starting to think a little bit more about Gen Alpha as well as they begin to age in the coming years into this late-teen age, I think that's.

Marcus Johnson:

Because that's what? 13 and down, correct, ages roughly?

Oscar Orozco:

Yeah. Let me clarify that. Right now, this year, they're either one year olds, but they're going to... Yeah, I know. So it's still very young, but they're also, they could be as old as 12.

Marcus Johnson:

12. Okay.

Oscar Orozco:

Exactly. Let's give it three, four years where they're becoming financially independent a little bit more, their budgets are increasing. I think that they're going to be pushing that behavior into early adulthood.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Let's be clear about live-streaming e-commerce and what it's going to take for this to become as successful as some other options. The future of live-streaming e-commerce rests on the assumption that people are going to voluntarily sit down and watch commercials, live commercials for an extended period of time just as a choice. Because that's essentially what it is. And this has succeeded. I say that jokingly because it sounds terrible, but the reality is, in China, that's succeeded tremendously because they made it entertaining. People will sit there and they will watch, you are watching a commercial for hours, they'll sit down and watch. And then the products change and the hosts change, et cetera. And they make it entertaining. And people, young people in particular, decided that this was a worthwhile way to spend their day and substituted in for watching a TV show or a movie or whatever, and that's what it's going to take here also in order for that growth to remain high.

Oscar Orozco:

Yeah, I mean I, with a pushback, sure. You can classify them as commercials, but it's a little more complicated than that. I mean, I think people in general have favorite brands. They have favorite influencers that they follow, that they want to hear about the new products there. I think there's so much potential. It's not just apparel, footwear, of course, we're talking about so many different product categories. It could be tech products, beauty, cosmetics, things like this. And so there's just so many different avenues you can go down. I think a lot of it's just also driven by platforms too, Ethan. So I think people are spending so much more time on YouTube, on TikTok and other socials. Meta, in 2023, seemed to pull out of the market, but I fully expect that this year, maybe it'll be next year, that they'll come back into the fray. And-

Marcus Johnson:

I believe Jasmine Enberg, our social expert, expects that. Expects them to jump back in this year, even though they did pull out really quickly. It's also hard for America and live stream shopping because what Ethan was saying, China is such a more advanced comp, close to half, in your report, Ethan, you mentioned close to half of digital buyers in China are live stream shoppers or buyers, and so trying to stack up against that is hard, but maybe there's a niche that America can carve out in terms of getting this right for this different type of consumer. Let's move to round 2, gents, the How It Will Technically Play Out challenge. Our chefs will explain in a bit more detail how they expect the trend to manifest. Let's go back to the pay TV one. Ethan, tell us more about what this looks like in practice.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

And you're right, I really, I said way too much in my opening, because I already explained the whole thing.

Marcus Johnson:

Unbelievable.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

In practice, we're looking at 65 million households in 2025 that are still going to have access to regular linear pay TV channels as compared to 70 million that won't. So in practice, we're already starting to see the ramifications of the slowdown for digital pay TV and the fact that it is not going to probably end up being a replacement for TV. It's not going to rescue the TV industry because, as I mentioned, the players, YouTube TV, Hulu with Live TV, and Fubo, there was just news already where Disney swooped in and acquired a majority of Fubo and I think they're actually going to fold Hulu with Live TV into Fubo to create one of the larger TV providers in the country. There was a lot going on with that story. There was a lawsuit related to sports rights and the now defunct attempt to create an app called Venue that was going to combine a bunch of sports.

But also what has happened is that Hulu with Live TV's growth has almost flat-lined. And these digital pay TV providers are confronting the same challenges that traditional cable TV providers confront, which is that it's too expensive and people don't want to pay for it. And so this is not really a growth market anymore. Five years ago, or even three years ago, growth was still pretty significant. You'd say, all right, well maybe there's a way to make money doing this now. I'm not sure if there really is sustainable the way these things currently exist. So you're already starting to see some M&A activity. I think you could possibly see some folks exit the market. You're seeing YouTube TV, it has to do this massive investment with the NFL Sunday ticket in order to get, and that worked. That seems to have worked. They've gotten a lot of new people thanks to the NFL. Where is this going to go sustainably over the long term? I don't know. I don't know how far it's going to go.

Marcus Johnson:

On the price point, I went back and looked, the price of digital pay TV has gone up outrageously fast. So when YouTube TV was launched back in 2017, it costs $35 a month. Today it's 83 bucks. So that's the inflation of 137% over eight years. I went and took a look. That's five times faster than the average inflation rate over that period. Inflation has been high, but 140% is very, very fast. That's a big part of it. It's interesting though, Ethan, because maybe the writing was on the wall here the whole time. If you go back and look, digital pay TV households, so as you mentioned, the Hulu plus Live TV people, the YouTube TV, they never had their up and to the right growth moment. It's been very smooth, staircase growth since it was invented. So it is flatlining now, but it's never been on this astronomical trajectory.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I guess the key takeaway is that for the TV industry, for these channels that are used to being in everyone's homes, and for advertisers and marketers that are used to being able to partner with them and assume that they're going to have access to the majority of the country, that's just gone and this isn't going to rescue it.

Oscar Orozco:

Yeah, I think and it's consumers who as usual, they're going to be the ones suffering the most. There's just less options, more expensive. And ultimately, yeah, we've talked about this a lot. I mean, I think this has been something we've mentioned here maybe for a few years now. It's just this reverse or re-transformation and going back to really the same model we've always had, which is going to be this just digital cable. And-

Marcus Johnson:

It cost about a hundred dollars a month.

Oscar Orozco:

It cost the same and none of these skinny bundles, everything's going to have to be lumped together. The only potential I do see guys, and it's this DirecTV, really recent developments there, maybe more of these sports-heavy packages that will be expensive, but that might cater to the right people who are looking to move away from traditional cable. And it's usually sports, it's sports that's driving that.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

And there probably is a future for linear channels in a very splintered way. So you mentioned the skinny bundle, but it also brings to mind the way that the existing streaming services are increasingly making their TV channels available. So you go to Peacock at some point in the future and you'll have a section of it that's just showing NBC and MSNBC. Or well, I guess that's not a good example because Comcast is trying to spin off all their channels, but a lot of these streaming services will have-

Oscar Orozco:

I see what you mean.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Channels available. So you'll be able to see some of the things, that you go to Max and you can see your TNT, but you can't see TNT anywhere else. So there's no longer that traditional cable experience.

Marcus Johnson:

Oscar, let's pivot back to your trend for round two. I've got a question here. So in the report, I think Ethan, you wrote, because you wrote five forecasting trends, and it's the one that Oscar was talking about, you wrote about it saying that live stream shopping is catching on. And I'm wondering whether we can say it's catching on because even though 50 million Americans will buy something off a live stream this year, our definition is people who bought something just once in the calendar year.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

Yeah, that's a good caveat.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah. How do we think about that?

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

It's the people, increasingly people are aware of this as an option?

Oscar Orozco:

That's an important caveat. And I think to your earlier point, Marcus, some of that growth might just come in something that our forecast is not quite capturing, but it's the frequency, right? Maybe rather than just once or twice, existing buyers will be doing it three or four times, which is just as important.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah, because it's hard to know of that 50 million, I mean there might be people who are doing it once a month, maybe most of them are, but maybe most of them aren't. And so it's hard to know what the behavior looks like in terms of frequency.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

It's extraordinarily challenging also from a production standpoint if people aren't doing it regularly. So to our point here, if you're someone who only maybe checks in on live-streaming e-commerce once a month because you get an inspiration for something that you want to go look for, you need that product to be conducting a live stream at that exact moment in time. Otherwise, it's not going to work.

So in China, that's what they do. They have people there 18 hours a day. So no matter when you choose to log in to look for lipstick or to look for your whatever appliance, there is somebody there at that moment producing a live commercial for you, we're not going to be able to do that in the US. That's too expensive. You can't have the talent sitting there 24/7 just in case somebody at like 02:00 am wants do their research. So if you are a casual, occasional live stream e-commerce shopper, that reduces the chance that you'll actually find what you're looking for.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah.

Oscar Orozco:

Yeah, and I agree with that. I was going to say, I think two things, yes, the growth from the US, it's not going to necessarily mirror what we're seeing in China. I think it's going to look a little bit different. So it doesn't necessarily mean that that is the future of what it will look like here in five or 10 years, but there are some things to learn for anyone who is looking to get into any live stream e-commerce events. But a couple of things, I was going to say, Pinterest, look out for Pinterest. Pinterest has been doing an incredible job with a lot of their shoppable media. I think they've specifically mentioned integrating it more into the platform. I think a lot of growth will come from there and they've had success referencing what I said earlier with Gen Z users recently. So look out for Pinterest.

I also think a lot of it will come from retailers partnering with these third-party partners that help build out the infrastructure. So it might not be super consistent events, but maybe once a year type of things. But I think that's where we're going to see lot of attention and growth coming from.

Marcus Johnson:

Okay. Let's move to round three, real quick. Showstopping Argument. Our chefs will pull out their best closing arguments, 10, 20 seconds as to why their trend is the most likely to happen. Ethan.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

It's most likely to happen because this is inevitable. What, I have to prove it? TV's been dying for ages.

Marcus Johnson:

Okay, [inaudible 00:21:35] tell us.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

I came on. I'm riding the most obvious wave. All right. My prediction is that within five years, linear TV is basically going to be a niche medium. And right now we're talking about the death of it, but we haven't actually gotten to a point where literally no one you talk to will have seen that thing that was on TV. And within five years we're going to be at that place.

Marcus Johnson:

Really quick, and this is to both of you guys, if one has the answer over the other, this shortfall not being made up, so people watching less of the live TV overall, whether it's traditional or digital, those viewers instead watching Netflix and YouTube presumably, or is that old pay TV time going to social media instead? Where's that time going?

Oscar Orozco:

That's a great question. I think it's going to other types of video content. So the short form social media, the reels, the shorts. Absolutely.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

We have that data point, and if I remember correctly, it basically balances out. So the amount of time that people are spending in front of video is a huge drop in TV time, increase in subscription OTT, fast channels, whatever, all the streaming kind of things. And it balances out and we're all spending about as much time in front of the big screen as we used to.

Marcus Johnson:

Okay.

Oscar Orozco:

And consider audio too. We keep hearing about video podcasts and videos on platforms. So yeah, there as well.

Marcus Johnson:

Oscar, real quick, what's your closing argument?

Oscar Orozco:

Yeah, awareness is increasing. Ethan, you said this very well in the report, but I expect that in the next three to five years, not only will awareness increase frequency of use, and again look out for Gen Alpha, I think they're going to carry this into adulthood, this activity, this shopping behavior. So that's where a lot of the growth will come from.

Marcus Johnson:

Very nice. Time to crown our star Taker or Baker. It's Ethan. It wasn't even close. To read all of Ethan's trends, five of them, pro subscribers can head to emarketer.com and search for US forecast trends to watch in 2020. Link is of course in the show notes. I'm kidding, Oscar, they were both really good arguments. Thank you so much to you both for being here today. Thank you first to Ethan.

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

My pleasure. Go read the report. Three more nuggets in there for you.

Marcus Johnson:

Yes, indeed. Thank you to Oscar.

Oscar Orozco:

I nearly fell out of my chair, but thank you. That was a lot of fun. Definitely check out the report. Yeah,

Ethan Cramer-Flood:

How good Ethan was? Makes sense.

Oscar Orozco:

Yeah. Always is. Definitely read the report. Great job. Thanks so much, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson:

Yes indeed. Thanks to the whole editing crew, Victoria, John, Lance, and Danny, Stuart who runs the team, and Sophie who does our social media. And thanks of course to everyone for listening in. We hope to see you on Monday for Behind the Numbers, an EMARKETER video podcast.