The analog TV is dead. Its funeral is in February 2009. With the passing of the grandfather of television the death of cable is not too far in the future.
With the growth of online sources for television shows it is not unreasonable to speculate that in the near future people may start to abandon the cable altogether and only keep their Internet connection. Already, stories are circulating on the net of those brave pioneers who, armed only with a Netflix membership and a laptop have forgone the coaxial tether.
Why would people still keep a cable connection anyway? Every HDTV you can lay mitts on these days has at least DVI, VGA or HDMI connection, usually two of the three. With these connections you can hook up a new HP Slimline computer or Apple TV, designed specifically for the task, and have the Internet on your TV in all of its streaming goodness.
Heck, you don't even need to buy a new computer to do all of this. Any of the three new video game consoles will do. With the Wii or PS3 you can stream your own downloaded content to the built in browser from any computer using Orb. Microsoft is about to debut a new update for their Xbox 360 that will stream HD videos straight off of the Netflix servers and into your TV. That, as they say in the video game world, is a fatality for your cable provider.
While it may still be a bit premature, I would be getting pretty nervous if I were a cable operator. The best hope may be that customers still need cable Internet to get to these new sources, but with Verizon and AT&T moving into the Internet business and both offering faster services than most cable companies, there is no guarantee that the Internet only customer will stick around.
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