Image: Showtime
Cablevision, which primarily services New York City's suburbs, continues to sell itself as the broadband provider of choice for cord cutters.The company said today that it will offer premium cable channel Showtime to its broadband-only customers as an HBO Now-like streaming video service, making it the first broadband provider to do so. Cablevision was also the first broadband provider to make HBO Now available to broadband-only subscribers earlier this year. You can, of course, subscribe to the streaming-only service if you don't have Cablevision, but you will need a compatible device, including the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Roku.Cablevision will also offer CBS All Access, the broadcast network's streaming video service, to its broadband-only customers. Pricing and launch details for both services will be announced at a later date.The pay TV industry is flailing as it attempts to figure out how to deal with cord cutters (even the Times is on it), people who've decided they can somehow manage to live a fulfilling life without having access to hundreds of channels of reality television. (Large media companies like Disney and Fox have collectively lost more than $70 billion in value in recent weeks over Wall Street concerns that their stranglehold over people's free time is waning.)One way to deal with this shift in consumption is break out channels like HBO and Showtime and offer them as streaming-only services. Expect more of these types of services in the future.Besides, broadband providers like Cablevision are all too happy to sell you more and more bandwidth to power all this streaming: don't forget that Comcast, the largest broadband provider in the country, recently announced that it now has more broadband customers than cable TV customers.