Executives at Verizon say they believe they can fend off competitors by focusing on customers. Under Mr. McAdam, a low-key industry veteran who succeeded Ivan Seidenberg in 2011, Verizon has made its customers the center of its strategic vision. “There’s been an epiphany here that we live in the age of the empowered consumer,” Mr. Canal said. Mr. McAdam, he added, “has been crystal clear that we have to change, and lead that change, or we won’t exist.”

The cable and telecom industries have long paid lip service to the idea of customer satisfaction, all the while finding ways to steadily raise prices while dragging their feet on technological innovation and customer service. It’s no wonder they remain among the least popular businesses in consumer satisfaction polls. But there’s a growing sense that a new consumer-centric era has dawned, with far-reaching consequences only starting to be felt.

“This has been building for over a decade,” said Mr. Kagan, the analyst. “The customer just kept getting angrier. Now the cable bundle model is dead. It made everyone in the business a lot of money, but consumers didn’t want it. Now they’ve got choices.

“Netflix and Amazon have been incredibly successful at delivering content over the Internet. There are a lot of public companies involved in this, and we’ll have to see which ones embrace change and lead and which ones don’t.”

Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Research said that Verizon’s bet on AOL’s advertising technology platform “speaks to disruption.” He noted that wireless use had surged but Verizon’s wireless revenue growth had not kept pace. Getting advertisers to pay more to reach wireless customers would be a “sea change,” Mr. Moffett wrote in a blog post for clients this week. “Verizon is pointing to a future where advertisers, rather than users, carry a heavier burden.”

Mr. Moffett also said he was initially puzzled by Verizon’s move to unbundle cable channels, which created “gratuitous friction” with the very companies that will be critical partners in its wireless video venture. Consider the sports network ESPN, 80 percent of which is owned by Disney. It sued Verizon, one of Disney’s biggest customers. (Verizon insists that existing agreements allow the smaller bundles.)

“Perhaps the answer is relatively simple,” Mr. Moffett said. “Maybe they don’t care.”

Or maybe the answer is that it doesn’t matter. Verizon, with a stock market value of $200 billion, more than 100 million wireless customers and nearly 20 million households with FiOS Internet or video connections, is so powerful that its partners have little choice but to adapt. They may be privately wringing their hands, but ESPN is the only one so far that has sued.