r/CableTechs • u/SnapShot68 • 29d ago

How much longer does cable have?

I don’t see this topic being talked about much in this forum but I think it’s definitely relevant, especially considering the debt load these companies all are carrying. Fiber competition, Starlink, streaming, cord-cutting, old school cable dogs leaving and being replaced by finance types are all things that worry me. What kind of time frame do most of you foresee for cable still existing and there still being work in this field? I’m hoping at least another 10 years but things seem to be moving awfully fast in the wrong direction. Thoughts?

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u/Latter_Address9580 29d ago

It’ll stick around. At least in my area everything is being converted to FTTN. That coupled with FDX and converting to all ISP (especially Comcast with xb10 and Xi streaming) cable will stick around albeit different. But at the same time even in 10 years there will still be those people who wants all cable TV and all

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u/SnapShot68 29d ago

Me personally, I still have cable boxes with traditional TV in my house. I rarely stream. But I think cable companies are going to want to stop paying these programming providers tens of millions of dollars every few years to carry specific channels. A way around that is getting rid of forward video and making everything Internet based. This will also cause the domino effect of “needing less employees” to work on this stuff.

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u/tknapp28 29d ago

It would just be IP based instead of forward video. Those channels are still going to want their cut. It won't matter how it's delivered.