Zachary M. Seward writes for Quartz:

You can now officially think of American cable companies as internet service providers with a declining side business in television.

At the end of June, the number of people subscribing to broadband internet from the nine largest US cable companies (49,915,000) exceeded the number of television subscribers (49,910,000) for the first time.

The only reason cable has lasted for so long is that Americans have a sentimental, maybe even romantic, attachment to their televisions. But now that we have plenty of ways to watch internet video on our televisions, traditional cable will continue to disappear. As far as I can see, the biggest hurdle to the eradication of cable now is the fact that cable is how people watch live sporting events. Once the internet figures that out, cable will more or less be finished.