A chart published by EMARKETER in September 2026 projects that the ten companies and services it counts as major players in American television will become six by 2027, as Paramount absorbs Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox absorbs Roku and Disney folds Hulu into Disney+. One of those transactions cleared its last legal obstacle on September 21, when Paramount Skydance settled an antitrust suit brought by 12 state attorneys general. Another, Fox's $22 billion purchase of Roku, is not expected to close before the first half of 2027.

In Short

EMARKETER drew a chart showing ten big names in American TV turning into six by 2027, because several of them are buying each other or merging their apps. That matters to anyone who buys TV advertising, since fewer and bigger sellers would control more of the shows, the screens and the viewing data. It is not quite a return to the days of three networks, though: in July the six groups on the chart accounted for about 58% of US TV viewing time, while ABC, CBS and NBC once drew more than 90% of the prime-time audience.

A chart built from three transactions

The graphic is titled "The Pressure on Traditional TV Will Lead to Further Consolidation" and subtitled "consolidation of major US TV players, 2025-2027". Its source line reads EMARKETER, Sep 2026, and it carries the chart number 372594. The 2025 column lists ten names: Amazon, Paramount, Skydance, Warner Bros., Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Fox, Roku and YouTube. Paramount and Skydance merge into a single red block for 2026. Dotted red lines then carry Warner Bros. into Paramount, Hulu into Disney+ and Roku into Fox for 2027, while Amazon, Netflix and YouTube pass through all three years untouched.

The chart reached a wider audience through LinkedIn. Todd Nicolini, whose profile describes his work as strategic research and insights, shared it around September 23 with a one-paragraph summary: "In 2025, there were ten 'major players' identified within TV landscape in the US. By 2027, that number will shrink to six after high-profile acquisitions are complete and Disney incorporates Hulu completely into the Disney+ platform." By the morning of September 27 the post had drawn 339 reactions, 14 comments and 26 reposts. Most of the comments disputed how the chart had been drawn.

They had a point about categories. Amazon, Fox and Netflix are companies; Disney+ and Hulu are two services owned by one company; Roku is a device maker and operating system with a streaming channel attached. That mix limits what the chart can say about concentration, and it shapes the question several readers raised underneath it: whether American television is drifting back towards the handful of gatekeepers it started with.

Where each deal stands

Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery

The first step on the chart is done. Paramount Global and Skydance combined on August 7, 2025, according to SEC filings, with both becoming wholly owned subsidiaries of Paramount Skydance. The chart still shows the two as separate players in its 2025 column, although the combination closed that August.

The second step has taken most of a year. Netflix agreed on December 5, 2025 to buy Warner Bros.' studios and HBO Max at an enterprise value of about $82.7 billion. Paramount countered with an all-cash bid for the whole company, cable networks included, and on February 27, 2026 Warner Bros. Discovery switched to Paramount's $31 a share, with Paramount paying Netflix's $2.8 billion termination fee, according to Warner Bros. Discovery's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Paramount chief executive David Ellison has said the company will combine Paramount+ and HBO Max into a single service with roughly 200 million subscribers. Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders approved the sale on April 23, the Justice Department cleared it on June 12, and the European Commission approved it on July 22 on condition that Paramount leave the UIP theatrical distribution venture within 13 months. The asset being bought has been shrinking in the meantime. Warner Bros. Discovery held 5.7% of US television viewing in May 2026, down from 7.0% a year earlier, the steepest twelve-month decline of any distributor in Nielsen's table.

Twelve state attorneys general, led by California's Rob Bonta, sued in July to block the merger. That suit, together with a separate complaint from the Writers Guild of America, was settled on September 21. According to the proposed consent decree as reported by CBS News, Paramount will invest an additional $300 million a year in domestic film production for five years, $1.5 billion in total, release 30 films in each of the first two years after the merger and 32 a year for the following three, and accept monitoring by a committee of five states. Al Jazeera, citing Bloomberg, reported that the terms also include headcount requirements at CBS and CNN. Bonta told reporters the settlement was not a vote of support for the merger. Ellison said Paramount now had complete clearance and could move toward closing.

Closing has not happened. Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders are owed a ticking fee of $0.25 per share for each quarter the deal remains open after September 30, a cost Al Jazeera put at about $7 million a day. In a filing on September 25, Paramount said its shares would move to the New York Stock Exchange on or about October 6, but also, according to Variety, that the timing of the Warner Bros. Discovery closing, if any, was not yet certain. At least one outlet, Pulse 2.0, has described the acquisition as completed. Paramount's own filing does not support that account. Reported valuations also differ, between $110 billion and $111 billion, depending on the source.

Paramount has argued that the combination is smaller than its headlines suggest. In second-quarter 2026 materials filed with the SEC, the company said that together it and Warner Bros. Discovery would account for 13% of total US television and streaming viewing time and 18% of the domestic box office over the previous 12 months. EMARKETER's senior analyst Ross Benes has put it differently. According to EMARKETER, the merger would leave one company owning 9 of the 20 largest US cable networks, 2 of the 5 highest-grossing film studios and 3 of the top 10 SVOD services.

Fox and Roku

Fox Corporation agreed on June 15, 2026 to buy Roku for $160 a share, made up of $96 in cash and 0.9693 Fox Class A shares, valuing Roku at about $22 billion in enterprise value, according to Fox. Existing Fox shareholders are expected to own about 73% of the combined company. Fox expects the transaction to close in the first half of calendar 2027, subject to shareholder votes and US and non-US regulatory approvals. Investors were unenthusiastic: Fox shares fell more than 15% on the day of the announcement, according to Tech Times.

The chart places this deal in 2027, which matches Fox's own timetable. What Fox would absorb is not a studio. Roku says its platform reaches more than 100 million streaming households worldwide, including more than half of US broadband households. Roku also accounted for 44% of hours streamed on connected TV devices in the US in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to Parks Associates research cited by Tech Times. Fox already owns Tubi, which it bought for $440 million in 2020 and which is now on track for revenue approaching $1.5 billion in Fox's 2026 fiscal year. The Roku Channel and Tubi held 6.3% and 6.2% of US ad-supported streaming respectively in the fourth quarter of 2025. Together, the two FAST services accounted for roughly one in every eight minutes of ad-supported streaming in that quarter.

Fox says the combined company would rank third in US television by share of viewing, and it has committed to running Roku as an open platform for rival services. EMARKETER's Benes told CBS News the purchase would more than double Fox's annual CTV advertising revenue.

Disney and Hulu

The third consolidation on the chart is not a transaction at all. Disney has run Hulu since 2019 and completed its takeover of the service in 2025, according to CBS News. Chief executive Bob Iger told investors on August 6, 2025 that Hulu would be fully integrated into Disney+ as a single app. The Hulu app left Nintendo Switch on February 5, 2026, and Business Insider reported in May on an internal document describing a multi-phase plan, called Project Gemini, to finish the unified app by the end of 2026. A Disney representative told Variety that Hulu will still be sold as a standalone subscription.

EMARKETER has estimated that the integration could push the combined service's annual US advertising revenue past $3 billion by the end of its forecast period, and that Hulu's ad revenue was more than double that of Disney+ beforehand. The change in the chart's Disney box is therefore a change of product, not of ownership.

What six owners would control

Nielsen's Media Distributor Gauge, which ranks parent companies by share of all US television viewing, offers one way to size the 2027 picture. Its July 2026 edition, published on September 10, put YouTube first at 14.2%, followed by NBCUniversal and Versant combined at 9.2%, Disney at 8.9%, Netflix and Fox tied at 7.8%, Paramount at 6.5%, Warner Bros. Discovery at 5.3%, Amazon at 4.3% and The Roku Channel at 2.9%, according to TheWrap's account of the release. Streaming took 49.0% of all television time that month, against 19.5% for broadcast and 18.7% for cable.

Add together the six groups EMARKETER expects in 2027 and they held 57.7% of US television time in July. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery combine to 11.8%, and Fox and The Roku Channel to 10.7%. Those two combinations would rank second and third behind YouTube. Disney, second in May, would drop to fifth.

Several caveats apply to that arithmetic. July included the final weeks of the FIFA World Cup, carried in English on Fox. Before the tournament, Fox stood at 6.5% in May. The Roku Channel figure measures viewing of Roku's own channel only, not everything watched on Roku devices, which Nielsen credits to the owner of each app. The Gauge covers all television viewing, advertising-supported or not, and Nielsen states that it does not reflect the currency ratings on which advertising is sold; methodology updates are due in the autumn.

The largest omission is the company ranked second. NBCUniversal and Versant, which Nielsen reports as a single line because NBCUniversal still sells Versant's advertising, do not appear on EMARKETER's chart in any year. Comcast completed the Versant separation of its cable networks on January 2, 2026, and said on June 29 that it would spin off NBCUniversal and Sky in a tax-free transaction expected to take about 12 months. A month later, NBCUniversal agreed to fold Peacock Premium into YouTube Premium in the US from early 2027, a form of consolidation through bundling rather than ownership. Include NBCUniversal and Versant, and seven groups accounted for 66.9% of US television time in July.

The comments underneath

Much of the reaction on LinkedIn concerned what the chart left out. A commenter listed as Aden, whose profile names Amazon MGM, WME and Vizio, wrote that the chart was "mixing up Studios and Streamers." He went on: "If it's Streamers, then it forgot Tubi, Fox One for FOX, HBO Max for Warner, ESPN for Disney, etc. If its Studios, its missing NBC Universal and Sony."

David Ferro, a media director, made the same objection more narrowly. "Emarketer made some interesting decisions with this chart," he wrote. "It includes Paramount but no NBCU and Roku but no other FAST vendors." Nate Norrish asked: "Where's Peacock? Apple? Hmmmm". Gian Constantine, whose LinkedIn headline describes him as principal E2E architect at Peacock, addressed the omission to his employer's parent directly: "NBCUniversal, are you the GenX of these type of graphs, sitting back, quietly knocking it out of the park?"

Others questioned scale rather than membership. Andrew Eldredge-Martin, chief executive of Ground Truth AI, wrote that "The same graphic but to scale on amount of time audiences spend with each platform would be illuminating - and show YouTube far larger". Michael Launder objected that the graphic draws Netflix "so small", arguing: "In terms of market cap and streaming metrics, it's many of these other platforms combined." Alexander Nempeque raised the operational question that no chart can answer: "You can merge catalogs on a slide; getting people to follow takes a little more work."

A return to the beginning?

Ken Niblock put the historical question most plainly. "This feels like an eventual return to how it was in the beginning, three channels," he wrote. "I remember when Fox was the new kid on the block, prognosticators said it wouldn't last, I suppose there's still time to find out."

The numbers say no

On audience share, the 2027 market would look nothing like the network era. In the late 1970s more than 90% of the US prime-time audience was watching ABC, CBS or NBC, according to Britannica. On Nielsen's July figures, the three largest owners after the pending deals, YouTube, a combined Paramount and Warner Bros. and a combined Fox and Roku, would account for about 37% of television time between them. Paramount's own 13% estimate for itself and Warner Bros. Discovery is a fraction of what any one of the three networks commanded half a century ago.

A closer match sits a decade later. By 1989, after cable had reached most American homes and Fox had entered the market, the Big Three's share of prime-time viewing had fallen to 67%, according to Britannica. The seven largest groups in Nielsen's July 2026 ranking held 66.9% of all television time. The two figures measure different things, the prime-time audience in one case and all-day viewing in the other, so the comparison is loose. It nonetheless suggests that the market EMARKETER sketches resembles the late 1980s, the landscape Fox entered, more than it resembles the three-network 1970s.

Fox's own path fits that reading. The company started a fourth broadcast network in 1986 and moved into prime time in 1987, the arrival Niblock recalls. If regulators approve the Roku deal, the newcomer of four decades ago would own the most-used streaming platform in American homes.

The structure says partly

The structural resemblance is stronger than the numerical one. In 1970 the Federal Communications Commission adopted the financial interest and syndication rules, known as fin-syn, which barred ABC, CBS and NBC from owning most of the prime-time programming they aired and from running syndication businesses. The commission's stated aim was to limit network control and encourage independent sources of programming. CBS spun off its syndication arm, which took the name Viacom in 1971. Viacom went on to buy Paramount Pictures in 1994 and CBS itself in 2000. The two split at the end of 2005, re-merged in 2019 and, renamed Paramount Global, combined with Skydance in 2025. That is the company now buying Warner Bros. Fox asked the FCC to reopen the rules in 1990, and the commission repealed significant portions of them in 1995, in an order published in the Federal Register on September 21 that year.

A combined Paramount and Warner Bros. would hold two major film studios, two global streaming services and two major news organisations, CBS and CNN, under one owner. That is the vertical model fin-syn was written to prevent, extended into streaming. The Fox and Roku combination adds a layer the 1970 rules never contemplated: the operating system and home screen through which viewers pick what to watch, and the household viewing data that screen collects. Roku's home screen inventory became accessible to The Trade Desk and Google's Display & Video 360 from the third quarter of 2026, just as Fox agreed to buy the company.

The regulatory response has also changed. The Justice Department cleared Paramount's purchase in June. The binding constraints in the US came from states and a union, and they took the form of production quotas, investment pledges and newsroom protections rather than asset sales. The Writers Guild of America said, according to Axios, that it continued to believe the merger would damage writers and the industry, but that it could not pursue a costly trial alone once the attorneys general had settled.

Two blocs, not one

The companies drawn with unbroken grey lines on EMARKETER's chart are the three that grew up outside broadcast regulation altogether. On September 14, Amazon, Netflix and YouTube formed the Streaming Access and Choice Alliance, a Washington advocacy group run by the trade association TechNet, as lawmakers pressed for rules that would pull live sport back toward free television. None of the three merging legacy groups on the chart joined. The six-player market EMARKETER projects therefore divides into three technology platforms whose supply does not depend on owning networks, and three media owners, Paramount, Disney and Fox, that are combining to hold their ground. The 1970s had three gatekeepers of one kind. The late 2020s, on this chart, would have six of two kinds.

What changes for buyers

Fewer sellers holding a larger share of inventory changes the balance of the upfront, the annual advance market in which much television advertising is committed. Primetime upfront commitments across broadcast, cable and streaming reached about $33.8 billion for the 2026-27 season, up roughly 9%, with streaming up about 30%, according to Media Dynamics.

Money has moved more slowly than audiences. EMARKETER places US connected TV advertising at just under $38 billion in 2026 and does not expect it to overtake traditional TV spending until 2028, and then by only about 2%. MoffettNathanson projects that linear television advertising will fall about 6% in 2026 and 8% in 2027, after a decline of about 7% in 2025, according to Inside Radio. That is the pressure the chart's title refers to.

The consolidation has three consequences the chart does not show. The first is scale in individual inventory pools. HBO Max captures about 1.5% of US CTV ad spending, according to EMARKETER, and a Paramount merger would place it inside a portfolio responsible for more than 5% of CTV ad dollars, comparable to Peacock and Netflix. The second is data. Fox's investor presentation pairs Fox's premium inventory with Roku's first-party household and viewership data and its targeting and measurement tools, so a broadcaster would hold viewing data gathered across rivals' programming as well as its own. The third is placement. The same owner would control the most-watched home screen in the country and the channels competing for position on it. Fox's commitment to keep Roku open is, so far, the only published safeguard; regulators have yet to rule.

Whether six is the right number is, in the end, a matter of definition. Counted by company, the chart omits the second-largest one. Counted by service, it leaves out Peacock, Tubi, HBO Max and Apple TV. Counted by viewing time, the three biggest owners after the pending deals would hold under two-fifths of American television viewing. What has returned from the beginning is not the concentration of audiences, but the combination of studio, network and distribution under single owners that US regulators once prohibited, now joined by ownership of the screen itself.

Timeline

Summary

Who: EMARKETER, which published the chart; Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery; Fox Corporation and Roku; Disney and Hulu; Amazon, Netflix and YouTube as the unchanged players; NBCUniversal as the omitted one; 12 state attorneys general led by California's Rob Bonta; and LinkedIn users including Todd Nicolini, who shared the chart, and commenters who disputed it.

What: A September 2026 EMARKETER chart projects that ten major US TV players in 2025 will become six by 2027. On Nielsen's July 2026 figures those six groups held 57.7% of US television time, and seven including NBCUniversal held 66.9%, compared with the more than 90% of prime-time audiences held by ABC, CBS and NBC in the late 1970s.

When: The chart is dated September 2026 and circulated on LinkedIn around September 23. Paramount settled with the states on September 21 and said on September 25 that its closing date was not yet certain. Fox expects to close the Roku deal in the first half of 2027.

Where: The United States television market, across broadcast, cable, streaming and connected TV devices.

Why: Linear advertising is projected to keep falling through 2027, pushing legacy owners to combine studios, networks, streaming services and, in Fox's case, a device platform. For advertisers, the result is fewer and larger sellers in upfront negotiations, larger inventory pools and a broadcaster in control of the most-watched home screen and its viewing data. The share of audiences is far from the network era, but the vertical structure fin-syn once banned is returning.