As Americans continue to cut the cord with their cable TV providers, one familiar name is being left behind. C-SPAN—one of basic cable’s OG channels—has disappeared from millions of households. Fifteen years ago or so, the public-affairs channels (there are three in all) were available via cable and satellite in nearly 100 million homes; today the number has dwindled to around 51 million.
All those lost homes, in turn, have translated into a dangerous slide in revenue. C-SPAN, a nonprofit, relies almost entirely on monthly fees from cable and satellite providers, which tack this cost (a mere 7.25 cents per household each month) onto their subscribers’ monthly bills. But as cable subscribers have disappeared, so, too, have the fees. C-SPAN’s revenue has fallen every year since 2018, and is down by about 35% over this period, according to its public tax filings. This year, C-SPAN’s expenses will exceed its revenue by about $8 million, the organization estimates—the largest shortfall in its 46-year history. Its current financial trajectory, CEO Sam Feist told me, is “not sustainable.”
What to do? C-SPAN wants to go where some of cable’s former subscribers have been going, namely to multichannel streaming platforms like YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, and Fubo (like traditional pay-TV providers, the streamers offer dozens of channels, delivered via the internet). The problem, however, is that that door remains shut: The biggest multichannel streamers have declined to add C-SPAN’s three channels to their lineups.
YouTube TV, owned by Google, frames its opposition in straight business terms. “Unfortunately, our subscribers have not shown sufficient interest in adding C-SPAN to…justify the increased cost to subscribers’ monthly bills,” a spokesperson told me (as an aside, the company points out that C-SPAN has its own channel on YouTube.com). A spokesperson for Fubo, which is merging with Disney-owned Hulu, emailed that her company is “open to discussing C-SPAN carriage,” but offered no further elaboration. Hulu didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Feist, a veteran CNN manager who took over C-SPAN last year, is naturally frustrated by this. “Bundled” streaming services have been major players in the pay-TV business, and now reach about 19 million subscribers overall—a number that would expand C-SPAN’s current distribution by nearly 40%. If YouTube TV alone offered C-SPAN to its roughly 9 million subscribers, the additional fees would almost eliminate C-SPAN’s revenue shortfall in one stroke. The real loss, Feist argues, is in the public’s ability to see the gears of democracy turning each day, live on TV. “We believe C-SPAN is critical to civil engagement [and] transparency,” he said.
C-SPAN has been unusually aggressive (for C-SPAN at least) in lobbying to get on the streaming services. A pop-up screen on its web page, for example, urges viewers to contact YouTube TV and Hulu and pester them to put C-SPAN in the lineup, a tactic long used by cable networks engaged in contract disputes with distributors. The window carries a bold red headline, “Access to Democracy Matters for All Americans,” followed by a Trump-y all-caps sub-headline: “Streaming Services Should Step Up to Make C-SPAN Great Again.”
C-SPAN’s desire to jump on the streaming bandwagon reflects a practical reality—old-school cable TV is dying—though it also has a certain historical irony. From its inception in 1979, C-SPAN has been all about cable. It was formed and distributed by cable companies, and has even promoted itself as “cable’s gift to America.” The connection is embedded in its very name; C-SPAN stands for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network.
No matter how they’ve been delivered, C-SPAN’s three channels have indisputably offered a unique public service. C-SPAN1, which went on the air in 1979, was the first to provide gavel-to-gavel live coverage of the House of Representatives. C-SPAN2 did the same for the Senate starting in 1986 (in March, it carried all 25 hours of Senator Cory Booker’s record-setting filibuster). A third channel followed in 2001, offering more unfiltered Washington-centric programming, such as congressional hearings, press conferences, and campaign events.
The result has been something politicians from both parties adore: endless hours of TV time, almost all of it unsullied by pesky fact-checkers or grandstanding anchors. C-SPAN’s founder, Brian Lamb, was so meticulous in his commitment to neutrality and in making elected officials the stars of the network that he prohibited program hosts from even announcing their names on the air, a practice that continues today.
While Donald Trump’s administration has targeted funding for public media outlets, like NPR and PBS, C-SPAN, which is owned by a nonprofit organization called the National Cable Satellite Corp, doesn’t receive any money from the federal government, insulating it from political influence. Almost all of its revenue comes from cable and satellite companies, which pay a fee—7.25 cents per subscriber per month—to carry the channels.
That said, C-SPAN appears less likely to be a target of Trump’s, given that the president is a fan. Trump has mentioned watching the network on multiple occasions, while White House deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr posted last month how “C-SPAN carries more Trump events than almost any outlet” and that “legacy media should take notice.” Elected officials on both sides of the aisle have even supported the channels’ campaign to get on the streaming platforms. In January, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Representative Mike Flood (R-Nebr.) wrote to the CEOs of YouTube, Fubo, and Hulu to argue it was “vital” for C-SPAN to be in their lineups.
