Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider has a good insight about the threat to cable from online feeds, which are now a trickle but could become a flood.    Blodget notes about the agreement between Yahoo and CNET:

… cable companies, meanwhile, depend on monopoly access to networks like CNBC and cannot afford to be circumvented by, say, a live CNBC web feed (lest a web trickle become a flood)…

I think Cable still has a viable future for at least the next 5 years because convergence of media is going to take a lot longer than most think, and if Cable is smart they’ll find ways to be the key broadband conduit into the home as they already are for millions of American homes.    It seems to me that the internet is more threatening to information driven media like newspapers than it is to entertainment driven media.   The is partly just a bandwidth issue – currently it’s not realistic to expect people to buy, configure, and use the fledgling broadband movie services.     How soon will this change?    5+ years in my estimation.   Of course eventually super high bandwidth streaming into most homes will be the likely main paradigm for home entertainment, but this won’t happen for some time.   We are too stubborn to innovate nearly as fast as technology allows.