HBO Finally Killed Cable

Call it the paradox of cable TV. As a medium, cable has been enjoying its so-called "Golden Age," with complex, immaculately produced dramas like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Girls, True Detective, and The Walking Dead earning impressive ratings and critical acclaim. But as a video delivery service, it's on the brink of becoming entirely obsolete.

HBO just announced that beginning in 2015, it will offer a standalone online streaming service. Thanks to the millions of people who've been illegally downloading Game of Thrones or swiping their parents' HBO GO login, the news immediately made headlines. NPR reports, in predictably NPR-y fashion, that "the move would seem to be a big one." That's an understatement—from where I'm sitting, it's the death knell for traditional cable television.

This may seem dubious, seeing as how the news is breaking at the same moment that a Golden Age cable show, The Walking Dead, set a record for cable TV viewing: 17.3 million people watched the season five debut. But all those people were watching something more historic than just the most-viewed cable TV show ever; they were watching the apex of Peak Cable.

HBO is just the most powerful cable network to allow users to cut the cord and opt for a la carte online viewing. There's been a steady trickle of other networks and services that allow you to do the precisely that. Comedy Central has a new app that allows viewers to access much of its content for free (some of it is still locked for non-cable subscribers), MLB.tv lets you stream baseball games, NFL.com does the same with football, and AMC lets you watch most of its shows, even premium titles like The Walking Dead online after it's aired, for free. TV streaming apps are, according to the New York Times, currently "soaring in popularity."

With HBO coming to your computer screens, Xbox, and iPads next year, there's almost no conceivable reason you'd need a cable subscription.

It's about time. As a service, cable is, almost across the board, an ugly, over-priced mess. Cable companies are the most hated in the nation for a reason—they are monopolistic monoliths that offer customers little in the way of choice and terrible service. If you want premium networks, like ESPN or HBO, you pay through the nose for a package and are rewarded with a glut of other channels you never watch. (In the past, cable execs have argued that the resultant subsidization make shows like AMC's Mad Men, which isn't a ratings behemoth, possible. That won't be the case as much in the future.)

Personally, I hate my cable company, with a kind of quiet, flaming passion for its incessant stream of irritations to my privileged life. I pay about $100 for a basic cable and high-speed internet package from Comcast, and both are absolute garbage. (The internet is consistently and inexplicably slow, despite my neverending calls to customer service reps, but that is another story.)

The average American, meanwhile, pays $64 a month for cable, according to the FCC, and that rate is only rising. The International Business Times reports that "the average bill for expanded basic cable rose 5.1 percent" in 2012. "That's about four times the rate of inflation, which rose just 1.6 percent during the same 12-month period, according to the Consumer Price Index." To get premium channels and high-speed internet, Comcast sells packages of up to $159.99 a month.

That is a lot of money to dole out for a pantheon of channels consumers have little to no control over—and considering that you could probably get nearly all the content you want, a la carte, for probably half that. If you are a baseball fan who likes The Daily Show, SNL, and Breaking Bad, then a monthly subscription to MLB.tv ($9.99), Hulu ($9.99), and Netflix ($8.99) will keep you happy for less than $30 a month. You can beam all of those services and more onto your TV with a cheap little box like Chromecast or Roku, or through an Xbox or BluRay player.

Then there's my cable. On a given week, I'm not even sure which networks I'll have access to. Some weeks I have TBS, where I'll occasionally watch Seinfeld reruns, some weeks I won't. No ESPN. No FX. No USA. Not that I'd particularly want to watch those networks, but their absence, along with the highly dubious quality of most other cable TV I've encountered, has helped convince me that cable is overpriced, absurd and anachronistic.

See, as a first-wave "digital native"—just typing that still makes me cringe, but I've more or less accepted my fate—I didn't have a TV for years. After college, my girlfriend and I would just watch stuff on the computer; on Hulu, on Netflix, or, yeah, on one of those virus-laden streaming portals hosted in China (a tip of the hat to you, MegaVideo). Even when we eventually splurged for a flat screen TV, after they became cheap enough, we still just hooked up a BluRay and watched online. This experience was more than satisfactory.

But we moved, and Comcast sold me on cable when I called for internet. It would only be $20 more they promised, for CNN, TBS (at the time), Comedy Central, and so on. My re-acclimation to cable has taught me many things, the pinnacle of which is: All those years I didn't have it, I was missing absolutely nothing. CNN is a mind-numbingly terrible news network, my life didn't need more Seinfeld reruns (and I could watch them on Crackle anyway), and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were already on Hulu, where I could watch them at my convenience.

In fact, every kind of content that cable TV produces, the internet usually does better, even when it's not specifically delivering the same show online. Certainly this is true for news, where Fox, MSNBC, and CNN account for a kind of nadir in the history of modern civilization's information delivery. The likes of Twitter, NYTimes.com, and Vice News (sure, I'm partial, but serious) will keep you more informed and entertained than all of the above, with video, if that's what you'd feel like you'd be missing. TMZ has more juicy celebrity gossip than anything on TV, Buzzfeed does VH1-style nostalgia trips in the appropriate amount of time (30 seconds versus 30 minutes), and obviously, anyone who watches music videos does so on YouTube.

And I'm not worried that the death of cable TV will deprive of us of future Mad Men. We've already seen that the likes of Netflix and Amazon are more than willing to pay for thoughtful, elaborate productions; Transparent is the best show I've seen this fall, and everyone seems to love House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. The shows themselves are still better than ever, hence the success of Walking Dead—which, by the way, counted plenty of internet users among its record-breaking viewership—and there's indisputably a market for them. Now, plenty of niche shows may fall by the wayside without the help of subsidies from the big packages—but ultimately, I think that means less crappy TV and more time-wasting on the internet.

I'm planning on returning to internet-only TV. More and more people are following suit—the number of households without satellite or cable TV has grown 44 percent over the last four years. That oft-uttered phrase "Oh, I don't have a TV" is no longer an affected hipsterism but a practical choice.

With HBO available online, the two things now keeping cable alive are the all-powerful ESPN (viewers still need cable to access its app, so it is now the major pull for enticing subscribers) and the inertia inherent to any long-accepted system. People used to cable are going to keep paying the bills. Ultimately, it will be cohort replacement that drives the final nail into cable's coffin—subscribers will simply eventually die off.

This doesn't mean that the internet has triumphed and won us a bullshit-free delivery system for our favorite shows. Cable companies have positioned themselves excellently to cope with this shift, by becoming our chief internet service providers as well, which means they'll still control the delivery mechanisms that make the shows viewable, and will no doubt find ways to increase profits over their streaming.

This is yet another reminder of the importance of preserving net neutrality. It's not hard to imagine a future where a newly merged Comcast-Time Warner offers users "high-speed delivery groups" of shows, ensuring high quality streaming for HBO GO, MLB.tv, or whatever else, for scaling fees. The power to deliver your favorite shows still lies in the hands of massive corporate conglomerates, in other words—but the days of pointless, overstuffed cable packages are drawing to a close.