Due to their rise in popularity, there is a common narrative that technology companies like Amazon and the ever-popular Netflix are slowly killing cable companies that were once giants in the field.
It's not a surprise why that is the case. In its attempt to adapt with the modern times, media and networks have made the switch to cord-cutting in favor of wireless, streaming services, and high-speed broadband distribution. There are no commercials, the service is "better," and you have much more control over the content you want to consume. This, in turn, is slowly leading to the death of cable companies.
At least, that's how the narrative usually goes. The quieter truth, however, goes a different way: Cable companies don't really care all that much.
Pay-TV or Broadband?
Of course, this narrative is not at all new. Pay-TV aggregation has always been a worse business compared to broadband distribution. In fact, it's been this way for years that back in 2013, Cablevision CEO James Dolan told The Wall Street Journal that there could come a day when his company could rely on broadband for its full revenue and not offer TV service altogether. Two years after that statement, Dolan would then sell Cablevision to Altice for $17.7 billion.
And get this: One cable service is even actively pushing investors to move away from traditional pay-TV service.
Leaving the old bundles
That company is Cable One, which is the seventh-largest US cable company. According to its CEO Julie Laulis, bundling TV services with the internet is not a particularly effective business model to follow nowadays.
In a statement, Laulis said, "We don't see bundling as the savior for churn. We pivoted to a data-centric model over five, six years ago, and we've seen nothing to derail us from that path."
And this "data-central model saw the company shedding cable TV stations for years now, even offering over-the-top video services like YouTube TV or Hulu with Live TV if customers call to cancel their cable TV subscriptions.
As a result, the company is the best-performing cable company among its peers since it first started trading publicly in 2015, with its shares going up to around 136 percent.
Clearly, cord cutting is a trend that will stay, and video revenue will continue to fall. And seeing Cable One's practices, it may even be cable companies themselves that will kill Cable TV.
