I've only subscribed to cable or satellite TV for a few years out of my 48, largely because I can't bring myself to spend $60 or more a month for a bunch of a channels I'll never watch. (Or whatever Comcast costs these days—it is literally impossible to figure out what your monthly bill will be with taxes and fees after your promotional period is up.) I know that makes me a little weird compared to the average American consumer, but less and less so with each passing year.

Give me the option to purchase only the channels I want at a reasonable price, and there are a handful of broadcasters who would find me a happy customer. But barring that, I'll continue to get my content elsewhere, mostly online, through whatever means I find most convenient.

When cable first started, and they were just jamming as many analog signals down a stretch of coax as they could, such a consumer friendly option simply wasn't possible. But with the advent of digital cable and the sophisticated set-top boxes it requires, all the technology was there to enable an a la carte alternative... if only the cable companies and the content providers were willing to offer it. They weren't.

But now, with the widespread penetration of broadband internet and streaming media, the networks have the perfect opportunity to cut the cable companies out of the distribution picture, reaping higher per-subscriber profits for themselves by selling directly to consumers.

For example, why can't I just download an ESPN app for iPhone or Apple TV, with or without a fee, and watch Monday Night Football via that?

Of course, I could, if the executives at ESPN were willing to rethink their model and embrace the inevitable. But rather than giving customers what they want—the hallmark of all great businesses—the cable and content providers are pushing the oppressive SOPA legislation in a short-sighted and mean-spirited effort to protect their monopolies from "pirates." As if the music industry's own disastrous experience with this approach never happened.

Cable TV was born as a response to crappy TV reception, with the added advantage of being able to bring hundreds more channels into people's homes than could be delivered via limited over-the-air broadcast spectrum. It was a technological solution to a technological problem. But now, like it's telephone land line cousin, cable TV as we know it is a dinosaur. In the broadband internet age, there is absolutely zero technological justification for bundling dozens of channels together into pricey subscription packages, and as such it seems unlikely that that the industry can continue to fend off competition based on more efficient and convenient technologies.

Yeah sure, an app-like model might sound scary to media companies that have grown fat and lazy bundling their various networks through cable monopolies and on to consumers. What if too many customers chose to purchase, say, only Animal Planet, instead of the full dozen or so sister networks Discovery Channel currently tries to force down our throats? But then, from Discovery's perspective, that sure as hell has to be better than the disaggregated alternative to which we appear to be headed, in which consumers purchase individual episodes of individual programs, obsoleting the whole concept of networks entirely.

Those of us who routinely watch TV through connected devices have seen the future... a future in which the old cable TV model is dead. TV networks that want to carve out a place for themselves in this future better get moving, before the television producers who create their content realize that the networks themselves are technologically obsolete as well, and start cutting them out of the picture in turn.