In 1948, “The Texaco Star Theater” with Milton Berle premiered on NBC television and folks gathered at neighbors’ homes across the country to watch.
Berle, who came to be known as Mr. Television, had little competition for his NBC show, with its parade of celebrities, skits, singing, dancing and preening.
But by the late 1950s, bigger stars eclipsed the former radio personality. Sales of televisions soared and the industry took off.
For decades the networks alone dictated a national narrative — until the cable companies stole their thunder during the 1990s. Now, both models are looking as dated as Uncle Miltie.
The soft launch of satellite-television provider Dish Network’s Sling TV — a $20-a-month streaming service — gives subscribers access to a handful of basic cable stations, including ESPN and CNN. The service, coupled with the popularity of streaming video and television services such as NetFlix and Hulu, is another step in the march away from the broadcast world as we know it.
HBO and CBS announced last fall that they would begin to sell their programming a la carte.
And with the number of viewers forgoing cable steadily increasing, there has been a chorus of cord-cutters calling for liberation from overpriced cable services that sell a bevy of channels most people never watch.
Still, the number of cable-cord cutters — an estimated 6 percent of all households, according to Experian Marketing — that rely solely on broadband is still slim. But that is going to change, and Dish Network’s move was the first step toward what will inevitably be the death of cable as we know it.
One clear reason is that the average cost of a cable bill keeps ballooning, as an FCC report released last year verified. Families don’t like doling out an average of about $64 a month for basic service. That’s about three times what it cost in 1995, and it can really climb with premium services added.
It’s a big bill for American families already struggling.
One of cable’s selling points is live sports, but with hefty broadcast deals rising into the billions, consumers are being forced to pay too much. The fees tacked onto cable bills for sports deals are rising and, for those who don’t watch sports, that’s a ridiculous burden.
Dish Network executives have couched Sling as a move to capture the young millennials, but the truth is that the move away from the old cable model is long overdue for everyone who could use a break from the high cable bills and programming choices with not enough substance.
Now consumers have a real option. They can pick and pay for what they actually want to watch and not dole out dollars for everything else.
It’s too bad the companies offering cable will likely dominate the broadband market that streaming video relies on.
Right now, Comcast Corp. is in the process of purchasing Time Warner Cable Inc. for $45 billion. If a deal is cut, the new company would be the largest provider of TV and broadband. Then there’s AT&T’s $48.5 billion plan to buy DirecTV.
That means some of the same players who have been gouging American cable viewers are about to corner another market.
But for now, consumers can get ahead. And even though Mr. Television is of the past, he can be streamed online.
