The cable bundle is under assault from technology and viewer habits. Mobile phones and tablets are stealing screen time. Tech biggies like Google and Apple are making a play to put all your channels online, where consumers could potentially watch and buy a la carte, as Quartz reports. Meanwhile, Netflix, Hulu, and the the Web offer so many hours of video entertainment (much of it financed by the cable bundle) that many young people have chucked the whole bundle altogether.

But Skipper is persuaded that if more Americans were simply making a little more money, there would be no fraught discussion about cord-cutters and cable-nevers. "The real issue is economics," he said. "Most of the cord-cutting has been financial." Not only does the bottom quintile make less than 15,000 a year, as Skipper often points out, but also about a third of households make less than $30,000 in after-tax income, according to the Tax Policy Center's distributional analysis.

"ESPN is a mass product," he said. Wage stagnation threatens to make it a luxury product.

Cable: So Cheap, Yet So Expensive

Skipper's acknowledgement that macroeconomics is intruding on entertainment economics is so fascinating, because the most common thing you hear from a TV exec is that their product is super-affordable.

On a per-hour-watched-per-person basis, cable TV costs less than $0.30 -- 30X cheaper than buying a two-hour movie for $10. When they're feeling bullish and defensive, the cable guys make a point best summed up by this graph below. Wage growth might be plateauing, but that plateau still sits miles above annual cable costs.

But $876 a year isn't nothing. And most American families don't make financial decisions by calculating per-hour per-person experience costs. They answer an easier question: Is this familiar number, my cable bill, eating into my disposable income?

The answer is yes. Here's the growth in TV costs vs. the growth in bottom 40 percent household income over the same time period as the graph above.

That's the picture that keeps John Skipper up at night.

The Near Future of TV

These are both boom years and nervous times for the richest media companies in America. Apple is meeting with ESPN and Viacom about putting sports on Apple TV, as Quartz reported today. Google is looking to steal the NFL from DirecTV. Essentially, everybody is having the same realization: Pay-TV, old-fashioned and fraught as it appears, could be the best business in America. One hundred million families pay at least $800 every year to the cable and media companies in exchange for a bundle of entertainment. This amounts to an $80 billion flat tax to fund the creation and transport of high-quality TV, and it's unquestionably contributed to a Golden Age that a la carte programming would struggle to uphold.

"A la carte is not a good solution for whatever the issue is here, and it's not particularly beneficial to anybody," Skipper said. Although he said he thought ESPN could still thrive because its fan base is large and rabid enough to pay through the nose for the worldwide leader, smaller niche channels (even those with great critical renown) might not fare so well if left to fend for themselves without the bundle's security. "We will be fine," he said. "I think Showtime and HBO would be fine. But channels 65 through 250 would go out of business, or they will start producing lousy content. Niche households wouldn't get what they want."