In 2015, you'll be able to subscribe to HBO by itself, without a cable subscription. It's one announcement, but it's had more of an impact in one day for the takedown of the cable oligopoly than any other single action to date. And companies like Netflix have spent the last half-decade trying to do only that.

Those companies, Amazon and Google's YouTube included, have made incremental gains in chipping away at a $100-plus billion cable oligopoly that—with the impending merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable—might become even harder to break down. But this was a wrecking ball.

As TechCrunch put it today: Let the Unbundling Begin. Or, in English: Let the death of cable commence.

HBO is the most valuable single network entity—sports aside—on cable, and maybe all of TV content creation. The New York Post wondered in July if HBO alone was worth more than Fox's $80 billion bid for all of Time Warner. It might be. And now you can watch it—and Game of Thrones and True Detective and John Oliver—without cable, or breaking the law.

That unbundling means that the inflated price of cable—even basic cable, which has increased 176% in price since 1995—is about to go down, or cable is about to die altogether.

Up until today, here was the position from conglomerates like Time Warner, the owner of HBO: Even if a large swath of the 80 million potential customers who don't have cable want HBO, it's not worth jeopardizing a large chunk of HBO's revenue stream to cater to them. HBO receives carriage fees from telecoms like Comcast and former subsidiary Time Warner Cable. (The two companies split in 2009.)

Here was Time Warner's fear if they were to relent to a cable-free HBOGO: If these potential subscribers are in the prime 18-to-35 demo, maybe they'll get so used to a la carte HBO and Netflix that they won't need cable when they'll be able to afford it.

It wouldn't be worth it to get $10-$15 from HBOGO-only subscribers now when they can get even more from cable subscribers—who'll also pay for TNT, TBS, CNN and other Time Warner entities—in the not-too-distant future. And those other Time Warner cable entities? They have a dual revenue stream to worry about—one that buoys the larger business with advertising dollars.

Surely, there are some who only subscribe to cable to purchase HBO, but those people might also be converted into potential watchers of high-priced ads on TNT's basketball or TBS's baseball programming.

Losing those viewers just wasn't worth the long-term risk.

But today, HBO flipped.

Now, this is arguably the Waterloo for the concept of the big bundle, the telecom industry's cash cow that lumps together expensive cable packages with limited choices and often ties them to Internet and home phone service. One study believes that if cable subscribers were allowed to choose their stations one by one, or even in smaller groups, the telecoms would lose $70 billion of revenue (about 50 percent of the industry) in a year.

HBO just took the first step toward that new reality.

Time Warner is betting big on a future with more choices and fewer expensive cable package subscriptions. If companies with even less business incentive to stay on cable—like AMC Networks, which has no NBA or MLB ad space to sell, but plenty of Walking Dead pirates that are potential customers—decide to join them, could this be it for cable?

Is that all it took the whole time? The dumbing down of sponsor-heavy basic cable, plus a handful of great TV shows on networks that eschewed that idea? Could this kill—or at least bring back down to Earth—the cable oligopoly?

Do not cry for the telecommunications industry.

Three of the final eight corporations in Consumerist's Worst Company in America poll last year were cable providers: Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and the eventual winner (or loser) Comcast. In the final, Comcast defeated Monsanto, the government's primary manufacturer of Agent Orange and DDT in their respective primes. Now two of those telecoms, TWC and Comcast, are merging into one company, as long as the FCC and Department of Justice declare that the new megacorporation does not constitute a monopoly.

Comcast, remember, has also been using its weight to lobby the FCC for rules that will limit speech on the web. If passed, the euphemistic "fast lane on the web" would allow telecoms to determine which messages get priority, and artificially slow traffic to competitors or unpopular speech. Most insiders believe the rules will pass because FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's last job was the President of America's largest telecom lobby—one that represents Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

This can only happen because it is too big and offers too little, and Comcast is only set to get bigger if they are allowed to purchase Time Warner Cable.

HBO found a way to undercut the industry with the hope it'll make a lot more money. It probably will, at least immediately, even if it might kill its parent company's most reliable long-term revenue stream. The only question remaining is why TimeWarner decided to join the fight.

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