The streaming industry has spent years treating cord-cutting as a choice between traditional television and on-demand services. New research from Parks Associates suggests the market may be moving toward a less binary model: 51% of U.S. internet households prefer a package that combines live TV with their favorite streaming services, creating a potential opening for skinny bundles, hybrid TV packages and new CTV advertising models.

Streaming Consumers Aren’t Done With Live TV—They Want a Better Package

The television bundle is not disappearing so much as being redesigned.

That is the central implication of new research from Parks Associates, which finds that 51% of U.S. internet households prefer a package combining live television with their favorite streaming on-demand services. The figure includes 27% who prefer a traditional live-TV bundle paired with streaming services and another 24% who prefer a skinny bundle combined with their streaming subscriptions.

The finding challenges the idea that consumers are simply moving from pay TV to streaming. Instead, many appear to want the convenience of both models without paying for the increasingly large channel packages associated with traditional television.

For media companies, distributors and advertisers, that distinction matters.

The next phase of streaming competition may be less about replacing linear television outright and more about determining how live content, on-demand libraries and advertising can be packaged into a service consumers consider worth keeping.

Parks Associates’ research, The New Live TV Model: Skinny Bundles, Sports, News, identifies this changing consumer preference as an opportunity for providers to rethink how live programming is sold.

Skinny Bundles Could Become a Retention Tool

The strongest signal comes from existing virtual multichannel video programming distributor, or vMVPD, customers.

Parks Associates says 68% of streaming pay-TV subscribers find the concept of a skinny bundle appealing. The category includes subscribers to services such as YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, Fubo and DIRECTV Stream.

A skinny bundle typically contains a smaller selection of channels centered around particular content categories, such as sports, news or entertainment, at a lower price than a broad traditional pay-TV package.

That creates a middle ground between two increasingly familiar choices: paying for dozens of channels a household may rarely watch, or abandoning live television entirely.

For providers, the economic argument may be particularly strong around churn.

A customer who wants live sports or news but is frustrated by the price of a large channel package could have another option before canceling. Parks Associates specifically identifies retention as one of the major opportunities for skinny bundles.

That changes the role of packaging from an acquisition mechanism into a defensive tool.

Sports and News Make Live TV Harder to Replace

The continued appeal of live television is also closely tied to programming that loses much of its value when consumed on demand.

Sports are the obvious example. Live games create appointment viewing, while news and major events can generate similar demand for real-time access.

Parks Associates says live content remains particularly important for sports, news and event programming. Its broader research also finds that U.S. consumers now subscribe to more than six video services on average, while subscription streaming reaches more than 91% of U.S. internet households.

That creates a difficult environment for streaming providers.

Consumers have more choices, but the proliferation of services can make the viewing experience fragmented. A household might need one service for entertainment, another for sports, a third for news and yet another for a specific franchise.

Aggregation can therefore become a competitive feature in its own right.

The Advertising Implications Are Significant

For the advertising industry, the shift toward hybrid packages could be as important as the subscription implications.

The more live television moves into streaming environments, the more CTV advertising inventory becomes intertwined with live programming. That creates opportunities for advertisers to combine the reach and immediacy associated with television with the data, targeting and measurement capabilities associated with digital advertising.

The market is already moving in that direction. EMARKETER forecasts that U.S. CTV ad spending will increase by 15.1% in 2026. It also projects that CTV upfront ad spending will exceed primetime linear TV upfront spending for the first time this year, with $17.73 billion in CTV upfront commitments versus $16.98 billion for primetime linear television.

IAB’s 2026 Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report similarly says U.S. digital video advertising will surpass $80 billion in 2026, with buyer expectations increasingly focused on performance, measurement, transparency and AI.

That combination puts live streaming in an increasingly attractive position for advertisers.

A sports-focused skinny bundle, for example, could give a distributor a highly defined audience while creating premium live-video inventory for advertisers. A news package could similarly concentrate viewers around predictable programming windows.

The opportunity is not simply more impressions. It is the possibility of making live CTV inventory more contextual, measurable and commercially addressable.

Media Companies Face a Packaging Problem

The challenge is that there is no universal skinny bundle.

A sports-heavy household may want ESPN and other sports networks but have little interest in entertainment channels. Another household might prioritize local news and national news. A third may care mostly about live events while relying on Netflix, Disney+ or other services for on-demand viewing.

Providers therefore need packaging systems that can accommodate different preferences without making the product confusing.

This is where the streaming technology stack becomes important. Subscriber management, recommendation engines, content discovery, advertising decisioning, identity, measurement and billing all have to work across increasingly complex combinations of services.

The business model is also changing.

Parks Associates’ findings suggest consumers are not necessarily asking providers to choose between traditional pay TV and streaming. They are signaling that the distinction between the two is becoming less important than the overall value and convenience of the package.

CTV’s Next Phase May Be About Packaging, Not Replacement

The implications extend beyond television distributors.

For advertisers and agencies, the fragmentation of viewing makes unified measurement increasingly important. For publishers and streaming platforms, flexible packaging could help protect subscriber relationships while expanding monetizable live inventory. For consumers, the appeal is simpler: fewer compromises between live programming and on-demand entertainment.

The industry has already moved beyond the first streaming question—Will streaming replace television?

The more consequential question now may be what television becomes when live programming, streaming libraries and advertising are delivered through the same digital ecosystem.

Parks Associates’ data suggests that consumers may already have an answer: they want both, provided the industry can package them around what they actually watch.

Market Landscape

The research arrives as the TV ecosystem shifts toward hybrid video models, where SVOD, AVOD, FAST, vMVPD and traditional pay-TV services increasingly overlap.

Three developments stand out:

• Hybrid packaging: Consumers increasingly want live programming and on-demand streaming in one experience rather than separate services.
• Skinny bundles: Smaller channel packages could give providers another tool to reduce churn without forcing consumers into expensive all-channel plans.
• CTV monetization: As live programming migrates into connected-TV environments, advertisers gain access to premium inventory that can support digital targeting and measurement.

The advertising economics are particularly important. EMARKETER expects U.S. CTV ad spending to grow 15.1% in 2026, while its upfront forecast puts CTV ahead of primetime linear television for the first time.

At the same time, IAB says digital video advertising will exceed $80 billion in U.S. spending this year, reflecting the broader shift of video budgets toward digital environments.

For AdTech companies, that means the future CTV opportunity is increasingly tied to live content, audience segmentation, identity, measurement and outcome-based buying.

Top Insights

• Parks Associates finds 51% of U.S. internet households prefer packages combining live TV and streaming, challenging the traditional cord-cutting narrative for providers and advertisers.
• Skinny bundles appeal to 68% of vMVPD subscribers, creating a potential retention strategy for providers facing subscription churn and increasingly fragmented viewing habits.
• Live sports, news and events remain important CTV programming categories, giving advertisers premium environments where digital targeting meets television-scale viewing.
• CTV advertising is gaining budget momentum, with EMARKETER forecasting 15.1% U.S. CTV ad-spending growth in 2026 amid accelerating digital-video investment.
• Hybrid packaging could reshape media monetization by connecting subscription flexibility with addressable advertising, measurement and audience data across streaming platforms.

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