Cable Companies Think You're Too Lazy to Actually Cut the Cord

​ For my money, the biggest news of CES—bigger than the virtual reality headsets and the drones and much, much bigger than the insanely expensive Walkman—was the fact that, starting soon, you'll be able to get ESPN without a cable subscription.

The reason why ESPN is worth so much damn money right now is because live sports were the only ace that cable companies had left to play. It was the biggest thing keeping millions and millions of people around the United States  ​from saying so-long to Comcast or whoever is currently charging them to get a couple of channels they watch, along with dozens of others they never clicked over to.

ESPN knows that, of course, and  ​it's why it gets more than $5.50 per subscriber from the cable companies—the so-called carriage fee. TNT comes in second, with a $1.33 cost per subscriber.

But starting soon,  ​you'll be able to get standalone ESPN, delivered over the internet, for $20 a month. You'll get some other channels thrown in for good measure. (Granted, the company delivering it, Sling, is owned by Dish Network.) This isn't news anymore—CES was weeks ago. The surprising thing here is that people in the cable industry maybe don't realize that there's a very good chance the whole entertainment ecosystem is slipping away from them.

So called "cord-cutters" still make up only a single-digit percentage of the overall population,  ​according to research firm EMarketer. But their numbers are growing, and, increasingly, millennials aren't cutting the cord—they're just never getting it in the first place.

"There's a lot of denial in the industry, especially coming from the providers," Tim Hanlon, founder of Vertere Group, a consulting firm contracted by networks and media companies to help them make decisions about their futures, told me.

That denial was pretty obvious at CES.

Randall Hounsell, vice president of strategic development at Comcast, said that cable networks are still offering consumers the best experience, and that networks aren't going to be able to hang on by themselves long term.

"There are two parts of the equation: content and experience," he said. "If you're delivering content, there's a good chance you can't deliver the experience."

Layer3 TV is a Denver-based startup cable company that hasn't really laid out its strategy yet, but the comments of its CEO and founder, former Comcast exec Jeff Binder, sound as though it won't be too much different from what we've already seen. He suggested at CES that consumers are too lazy to subscribe to multiple services, say, Amazon Prime and Netflix and Hulu and Sling, and would rather have it all in one place—the "shopping mall" mentality of a traditional cable provider-like experience.

"I don't think the cable TV model gets obliterated by the fact that there's Netflix. Someone has to be responsible for aggregation. The jury is out on whether competing ecosystems [like Netflix and Amazon] will work," he said. "It's sort of like a shopping mall. Stores have to bunch together to gain traction. If you stand alone, there's a barrier to entry."

He suggested that cable companies on-demand services work because they can do it from within their cable company's ecosystem—even if a movie is available for free on, say, Hulu, but costs money On Demand, people will pay for it because it's sitting in front of them.

"Consumers don't want to have to find that movie [for free]," he said. "There's a buffet mentality of having it in front of you."

Binder and Hounsell's takes are pretty massive bets for cable companies to be taking: Hoping that HBO can't figure out how to keep its HBO Go app up during a Game of Thrones premiere, and hoping that consumers are simply too lazy to bargain shop or Google what movies are coming off of Netflix streaming soon or use a Roku doesn't seem like a long-term business strategy, Hanlon said.

Meanwhile, Netflix itself has said that its homemade programming has been massively successful, and that it's going to make more of it. Increasingly, the content creators and the delivery platform are one-in-the-same, and consumers don't really care. (This does ignore the elephant in the room: The fact that, for many people, if you cancel your Comcast cable, you probably still have Comcast internet with which to stream all these shows.)

Watch this series if you haven't yet.

The idea that consumers are lazy doesn't hold up, in my experience, though I can't speak for the older generation. People are increasingly willing to shop around for content, and it doesn't really matter where it is. If it's good, people will watch it. And if it's free somewhere, they'll get it from there. In the last year, without really adding any sort of burden, I've watched Transparent on Amazon, Girls on HBO, High Maintenance on Vimeo, Orange is the New Black on Netflix, and any number of documentaries and movies on all of the above. According to Hanlon, millions of other people have, too.

Platform agnostic streaming boxes like the Roku 3 will search across all services for you with no fuss, and it doesn't really take that long to search on several different services yourself if you've got another streaming box.

"One area of denial I'm talking about is this idea of consumer arbitrage. So much of the cable business relies on consumers being lazy, but the younger generation isn't like that anymore," Hanlon said. "They're not going to pay $4.99 to Comcast for something they can get for free on Amazon Prime."

One group of important people who are noticing the trend is the networks themselves.  ​That's why you see HBO and ESPN going out on their own.

Then, you've got networks like FX, Comedy Central, and  ​CBS with either standalone a-la-carte offerings, or at least the ecosystem already built do make a switch very quickly. You can't buy Comedy Central or FX a-la-carte, but they both have their services ready to go. The change from requiring a cable package to offering their shows directly to consumers is a matter of flicking a switch and accepting payments (and probably negotiating with cable companies out of whatever contract the network may or may not have).

"People follow content, not networks. If our audience is who we're serving, it's imperative to us that we create amazing content and then make sure we get it out there somehow," said Detavio Samuels, an executive at TV One, a TV network targeted at black Americans that is available in 57 million homes nationwide. "We're looking at ourselves as more of a studio creating content than we are looking at ourselves as a network."

So, while networks like Samuels's are busy trying to give consumers what they want, cable companies are desperately trying to hold on to the main thing that has kept them relevant in recent years: The idea of viewing windows.

The thinking goes that live TV "events," which need to be viewed as they happen, is what keeps people locked into their cable contracts. When Discovery Channel  ​promises to show a man being eaten by a snake, when the finale of The Bachelor is hyped, every episode of Breaking Bad's last season—these are the things cable companies (and networks, I suppose) dream of. And it's why ESPN (and the cable companies who carry it) have always had what Hanlon calls the "default supremacy of live sports."

"The majority of content is still viewed within a 24-hour window of when it airs. People don't defer to binge view," Binder said. "And social media makes it impossible to not be exposed to happenings in [must-see] shows."

He's not wrong, but increasingly, must-see "television" is a web series produced on Vimeo or something made by Netflix or Amazon or a company that doesn't really give a damn when its customers watch it, as long as they do watch it.

And now, ESPN has decided that it doesn't care where their customers watch their sports, and that might just change everything.