For almost forty years, cable television was one of the most dependable business models ever built. A company laid a wire to your house, sold you a bundle of a few hundred channels, rented you a box to watch them on, and raised the price a little every year.
That world is ending faster than most executives predicted. In 2026 the television set is still the most-watched screen in the home, but the signal reaching it increasingly travels over the open internet instead of a dedicated cable line. The technology behind that shift is internet-delivered television, or simply internet TV, and it now covers everything from global streaming platforms to regional services such as IPTV Quebec. It is doing to cable what streaming music did to the CD: keeping the product people love while tearing up the way it is packaged, priced, and delivered.
This article looks at the numbers behind the shift, why the old model is breaking, how internet TV economics differ, and what founders in any subscription business can learn from it.
What Internet TV Actually Means
Internet TV is a simple idea. Instead of sending television as a broadcast signal through coaxial cable, a satellite dish, or an antenna, the provider sends it as data packets over an internet connection, the same way a web page or a video call arrives. The viewer watches through an app on a smart TV, a streaming stick, a phone, or a small set-top box.
There are two broad flavors. The first is the managed kind, run by telecom operators over their own networks. Bell Fibe TV in Canada, EE TV in the United Kingdom, and many fiber operators across Europe and Asia work this way. The operator controls the network from end to end, so it can guarantee picture quality and bundle TV with broadband and mobile service.
The second flavor is delivered over the open internet, often called OTT, for over-the-top. Live TV services such as YouTube TV, Sling, and Fubo in the United States, and Sky Stream or NOW in the United Kingdom, belong here, along with thousands of smaller regional and niche providers. The customer brings their own broadband and the provider supplies the channels, the program guide, and the on-demand library.
What both flavors share is the feature that matters most to the business model: television stops being tied to a physical network that one company owns. Once TV is just another app, any company with content rights, servers, and a payment page can compete for the living room.
The Numbers: Cable’s Decline Is No Longer Gradual
The data from the past eighteen months reads like a case study in disruption.
In the United States, Nielsen’s monthly report The Gauge showed streaming passing broadcast and cable combined for the first time in May 2025. A year later the gap had widened considerably. In May 2026 streaming accounted for 48.6 percent of all television watch time, while cable had fallen to 20.4 percent and broadcast to 19.2 percent. YouTube alone took 13.8 percent of TV viewing, more than any other media distributor. It is no surprise that more households now compare their cable package against a streaming bundle or an IPTV subscription before renewing.
Subscriber counts tell the same story. Industry trackers citing Leichtman Research Group put traditional pay-TV at roughly a third of American households at the end of 2025, down from more than 80 percent at the 2011 peak. Around five million pay-TV subscriptions disappeared in 2025 alone, and Comcast, the largest cable operator in the country, lost about 1.15 million video customers over the year.
Canada is following the same curve. Convergence Research estimated that 46 percent of Canadian households had no traditional TV subscription at the end of 2024 and projected that the figure would reach 54 percent by 2027. Streaming subscription revenue in Canada grew about 15 percent in a year to 4.2 billion dollars, while linear TV subscription revenue shrank about 5 percent to roughly 6.5 billion.
Meanwhile the internet TV market itself is growing at a pace cable has not seen in decades. Mordor Intelligence values the global market for internet-delivered television at 66.63 billion US dollars in 2026 and forecasts 137.22 billion by 2031, a compound annual growth rate of 15.55 percent, with Asia-Pacific growing fastest. One side of the industry is shrinking by single digits every year while the other doubles in five. That is what disruption looks like on a spreadsheet.
Why the Cable Business Model Is Breaking
Cable’s problem is not that people stopped watching television. It is that the model depended on four pillars, and all four are cracking at once.
The bundle
The cable bundle worked because everyone paid for everything. Sports fans subsidized cooking channels, and households that never watched sports paid several dollars a month for sports networks anyway. The arrangement was hugely profitable as long as nobody could opt out. Once viewers could buy entertainment separately, the households that valued the bundle least left first. Every departure pushes the fixed cost of programming onto fewer customers, which forces price increases, which drives more departures. Economists call this a death spiral, and cable is in one.
Programming costs
Channel owners charge cable companies a fee per subscriber, and those fees, especially for sports, have climbed for two decades. The operator is squeezed from both sides: content costs rise every year, but customers now have alternatives and will not absorb unlimited increases. In the United Kingdom, Sky raised prices again in April 2026, taking Sky Sports to around 36 pounds a month and TNT Sports to around 34 pounds. Each increase is rational in isolation. Together they teach customers to shop around.
Infrastructure
A cable network is enormously expensive to build and maintain. There are trenches to dig, amplifiers to power, technicians and vans to dispatch, and set-top boxes to buy, ship, repair, and recover. Those costs made sense when the network carried a high-margin product. They make much less sense when the same wire is increasingly valued only for broadband, and the TV product riding on it is losing customers every quarter.
Lock-in
Long contracts, equipment rental, installation appointments, and cancellation phone calls were once a moat. Today they are a liability. A generation raised on one-click subscriptions treats friction as a reason to leave, not a reason to stay, and regulators in several countries have moved to make cancelling easier. A business that keeps customers mainly by making departure painful has no defense once departure becomes easy.
How Internet TV Economics Are Different
Internet TV attacks each of those pillars with a structural advantage rather than a marketing one.
The first advantage is capital. An internet TV provider does not build a last-mile network. It rides on broadband the customer already pays for, and global fiber connections passed 600 million lines in late 2025, so that foundation keeps getting better at no cost to the TV provider. That is how newer brands such as TellyCanada IPTV can launch without laying a single cable. The main expenses are content rights, servers and content delivery networks, software, and customer support. That cost base scales with the number of subscribers instead of the number of streets.
The second advantage is hardware. Most viewers already own a smart TV, a Fire TV Stick, an Android box, or a phone. When the customer supplies the device, the provider avoids one of cable’s largest recurring costs and the customer avoids a rental fee. Onboarding happens in minutes through an app download instead of days through a technician visit.
The third is flexibility. Internet delivery makes it cheap to offer monthly plans, multi-month discounts, extra connections for a second screen, free trials, and money-back guarantees. A provider can test a new price on Monday and change it on Friday.
The fourth is reach. A cable company can only sell where its wires run. An internet TV service can sell to anyone with a decent connection, which turns previously uneconomic audiences, such as speakers of a minority language or expatriates scattered across a continent, into viable markets.
The fifth is data. Every stream produces information about what is watched, when, on which device, and where playback fails. Used responsibly, that data improves the channel lineup, sharpens recommendations, and flags churn risk before the customer cancels. Cable boxes produced a fraction of this insight.
The Incumbents Are Moving to Internet Delivery Too
The clearest proof that internet TV is winning is that the companies it threatens are adopting it.
Sky, once synonymous with the satellite dish, now sells Sky Glass and Sky Stream, which deliver the full service over broadband with no dish at all. Virgin Media offers an internet-delivered Stream box. BT’s television service became EE TV, built around IP delivery. In Canada, Bell’s Fibe TV has run over the company’s fiber broadband network for years. In the United States, the big cable operators have been steadily moving video customers onto IP-based apps and lighter streaming bundles while concentrating investment on broadband.
The strategic logic is plain. If television is going to travel over the internet regardless, an operator would rather retire its expensive legacy video plant, keep the broadband relationship, and offer TV as a lightweight add-on. Research cited by Mordor Intelligence found that European operators offering super-aggregation, a single guide that merges live channels with services like Netflix and Disney+, reduced churn by 18 percent. The cable company of 2030 will look less like a channel wholesaler and more like a broadband provider with a very good TV app.
Where Small and Regional Players Fit In
Disruption rarely hands the whole market to one new giant. It fragments it, and fragments are where small businesses live.
Traditional cable could never serve small audiences profitably. Carrying a channel meant giving up scarce capacity on the wire, so lineups were built for the mass market. IP delivery removes that scarcity. A provider can build a package around a language, a region, or a passion and reach those viewers wherever they are.
Quebec is a good example. French-speaking households want local news, Quebec-made drama, hockey commentary in French, and international French-language channels, a mix that national English-first bundles have often treated as an afterthought. That gap has made room for regional streaming TV brands such as Tiviplus, which focuses specifically on the French-speaking Quebec market instead of trying to be everything to everyone.
For entrepreneurs the lesson is familiar from e-commerce and software. When distribution costs collapse, the winners are not only the platforms with the biggest catalogs but also the specialists who understand one audience better than anyone else and serve it with the right content, in the right language, with support that actually answers.
New Revenue Models: Ads, Free Channels, and Rebundling
Internet delivery is also changing how television makes money, not just how it is delivered.
Advertising is returning in a more precise form. Internet delivery allows addressable ads, where two households watching the same program see different commercials. Ad-supported tiers are now the growth engine of streaming, and Convergence Research found that ad-supported plans in Canada cost on average 39 percent less than ad-free ones, which explains their appeal to price-sensitive households.
Free ad-supported streaming television, known as FAST, has revived the lean-back channel experience at zero subscription cost. In Nielsen’s May 2026 data, The Roku Channel alone reached 3.1 percent of all TV viewing in the United States, a share many cable networks would envy.
Finally, the bundle is coming back in a new shape. Households that subscribe to several services discover that the combined bill rivals the cable package they abandoned; Convergence counted an average of 2.6 streaming services per Canadian household, with leading providers raising prices around 6 percent a year. That fatigue creates demand for aggregators that put live channels, on-demand libraries, and billing in one place. The irony is hard to miss: the industry is rebuilding the bundle, only this time the customer can leave whenever they like.
The Risks: Piracy, Licensing, and Churn
An honest account of internet TV has to include its problems, because they shape the business as much as its advantages do.
The largest is piracy. The same low barriers that let a legitimate startup launch a TV service let unlicensed operators resell channels they have no right to distribute. Rights holders and enforcement bodies in Europe and North America have stepped up action against illegal services, including court-ordered blocking and prosecutions of resellers. For consumers, the practical advice is to check who is behind a service and how it handles payments and refunds. For operators, the message is sharper: content licensing is the real cost of doing business in television, and a model that ignores it is not a business but a liability waiting to mature.
The second risk is regulation. Governments are still deciding how far broadcasting rules, local content obligations, and consumer protection law extend to internet-delivered services. Canada’s effort to bring online streaming into its broadcasting framework shows how quickly the ground can shift under a provider.
The third is churn. The flexibility customers love cuts both ways. With no contract and no equipment to return, subscribers join for one sports season or one hit series and leave when it ends. Internet TV providers must earn the renewal every month through reliability, content, and service. Picture quality during a big match on a Saturday afternoon is the moment of truth; a service that buffers at kickoff will not survive many weekends.
What Founders Can Learn From the Cable Collapse
You do not need to work in media to take something useful from this story.
- Friction is not a moat. Cable confused customers who could not leave with customers who did not want to. The moment an easier alternative appeared, years of resentment turned into cancellations. Build retention on value delivered, and make leaving easy enough that staying means something.
- Watch your least happy customers. The households that cut the cord first were those paying for channels they never watched. Every subscription business has an equivalent group quietly overpaying, and a competitor will eventually build a product just for them.
- Fixed costs are dangerous in a shrinking market. Cable’s infrastructure was an asset on the way up and an anchor on the way down. Where you can, choose cost structures that scale with customers.
- Niches are markets. Lower distribution costs make small audiences profitable. Being the best service for one community beats being the tenth-best for everyone.
The Bottom Line
Television is not dying in 2026. People are watching as much as ever, and the big screen in the living room remains the center of home entertainment. What is dying is a specific way of selling it: the fixed bundle, the rented box, the long contract, and the dedicated wire.
Internet TV replaces all four with software. It lowers the cost of entry, widens the addressable market, gives customers control over what they pay for, and hands providers better information about what viewers actually want. It also brings real challenges around licensing, regulation, and loyalty that will separate durable businesses from short-lived ones.
For cable executives, the next five years are about managing decline gracefully while rebuilding around broadband. For entrepreneurs, the same five years are an opening. A 66 billion dollar market growing more than 15 percent a year, with room for specialists who serve a defined audience well, does not come along often. The companies that win it will be the ones that remember the lesson cable forgot: customers stay when they want to, not when they have to.
