Cable is going to die. Everything will be going On Demand/Streaming/Smart TV. There will be no Cable TV anymore. Everything will be over the Internet.
NFL games have already been broadcast on Yahoo and Twitter. There’s already Apple TV, Amazon Fire Stick, Hulu, Netflix and on and on. That’s where we’re heading.
Never, because they can’t. 5 companies own the vast majority of the cable dial, and those companies LOVE bundles and won’t sell to the cable companies in anything but bundles. As long as the cable companies must buy in bundles they must sell that way too.
I used to be an attorney representing some of the big cable companies. The content providers (like ESPN) dictate the costs and terms of carriage. For example, ESPN used to require the cable companies to: (1) carry ESPN on the basic tier (so if you ordered cable, ESPN had to be included); (2) carry all other ESPN channels they currently offered or would ever create; and (3) required the channels to be next to each other in the cable lineup. This was 10-15 years ago, but the cable companies pretty much were at the mercy of ESPN and those creating the content.