I’ll be surprised if they’re still around in 10-20 years, but who knows.
There's really no doubt they'll still be around: Linear television service may ebb and flow, but those companies are still among the best ways to get broadband service. Even Google Fiber hasn't caused the kind of disruption to the broadband market here in Atlanta that some folks were hoping it would.
And of course broadband becomes the next battleground. Now that those who cut the cord are beginning to see their streaming service early adopter advantage expire, there's going to have to be a new target. Clearly, it'll be the broadband services. "Why are they charging us what broadband service is worth instead of the lesser amount that we want to pay?" As I mentioned earlier, pricing always eventually goes back to what is dictated by value-based pricing.
The question will be what people are willing to do vis a vis broadband service. That's one of the biggest bits of silliness in all this: So many people have been cluelessly bashing cable companies, broadcast networks, etc., about being "monopolies"
when there is, in fact, effective competition in all those spaces, while failing to take effective action in response to how much less competition there is in the broadband space.
I think part of the reason is that people just want to complain, and really don't want to do what's necessary to confront lack of competition: Treating broadband the same way electricity is treated, i.e., the "R" word (regulation). Of course, that's not a panacea either: Turning broadband into a regulated utility means giving broadband service providers a regulated amount of profit, and thereby locking people into dependence on a service that will invariably cost more than people want to pay with no real way to hope for a better deal.
I think many people would rather hold out baseless hope that suddenly the cost of stringing fiber to every home in America will become so cheap that a dozen companies will all string their own fiber (which is silly given that so much of the upfront cost involved is labor, and labor is really expensive - heck, how many different companies have strung electrical distribution wiring into your community?), and completely ignoring their experiences with subscription video that I outlined earlier in the thread, i.e., even in a competitive marketplace, "pricing always eventually goes back to what is dictated by value-based pricing".
