• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, Today

Cord-cutting continues to eat into the traditional linear TV pay TV business -- with subscriber declines of around 10% in recent quarters -- now landing at an estimated 40-or-so million, according to Bernstein Research.

Adding in virtual pay TV providers has not helped much -- contributing to a total decline over the last couple of quarters of around 5%, resulting in a total of about 62 million subscribers.

All this has driven declines in linear TV affiliate revenues --- anywhere from 3% (for Walt Disney) to a recent 8% drop (for Warner Bros. Discovery).

At the same time, only one legacy TV-network-based media company still shows gains: Fox Corp. And you probably know the reason why: High-valued sports and news content.

Fox Corp. posted an eye-opening 5% gain in the most recent first quarter to about $2 billion in linear affiliate revenue -- a number that has been trending higher, growing from a 2% increase starting in the third quarter of 2023.

Fox is still big on what linear TV can do for its business. Only recently did it announce a broad-based premium streaming platform -- Fox One -- that will house news, sports, and entertainment content. But this is about six years after legacy TV media companies launched their own premium streaming platforms.

Even then, Fox's announcement of its forthcoming streamer is designed to “complement” -- not replace -- its traditional broadcast and cable channels.

This, of course, is why Fox has been able to weather the rise of premium streaming competitors, which currently have been seeing some maturing of their business and cutbacks. That said, many premium streamers are now profitable.

Walt Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are now regularly posting quarterly positive cash flow. Paramount Global and Comcast (NBCUniversal) are improving, but are still in the red.

To be fair, Fox Corp. -- like other legacy media companies-- has been impacted by losing cord-cutting subscribers -- down 6.5% in the first quarter of this year, according to Bernstein Research. But this is a smaller decline than Disney (8%) and WBD (9%).

Does it expect this to continue? Possibly.

Think about this: For Fox One, the company doesn’t even intend to target the usual suspects -- longtime pay TV customers. Instead, it looks to target mostly “cord-nevers” -- those who have never had traditional cable/satellite TV subscription in the first place.

This makes sense in terms of explaining why Fox Corp. still focuses on preserving legacy TV partnerships.

Hard-pressed executives at companies like Comcast Corp., Charter Communications, YouTube TV, Sling, Hulu+Live TV must be smiling -- at least a little bit.