This is a transition that has been several years in the making-- ever since Internet video became viable in terms of bandwidth, really.
Now that the old cathode-ray tube is practically obsolete and most everyone has gone to flat-screen TVs, the television set does not have much of an appreciable difference from a computer monitor.
The question is, of course, where these subscribers are going-- and if Internet connections are booming, but companies like Time Warner are losing subscribers, then how are they getting their Internet? Well, I suspect Verizon is going to get a big benefit from this. They have both mobile content and landline broadband (FiOS) with a far better reputation than Time Warner Cable.
In terms of content, cable has been fracturing ever since it was launched. Gone are the days of three TV stations to a market, if you were lucky. Now you have hundreds of channels chasing ever smaller niche markets, with less and less budget for programming (hence why you turn on any cable channel before about 6:00 at night and find nothing but infomercials and wall-to-wall reruns of the stuff they've already shown countless times before). As a result, the idea of programming a 24-hour-a-day channel of original content is dying rapidly. Daytime is already practically dead. Late night may very well be soon to follow. Instead, the new paradigm is to rerun a show as much as you can in the hopes that someone new will stumble upon it. (I suspect Duck Dynasty became a huge hit that way.) The cable market is saturated with channels, so the chances of any person watching at any given time plummets with that much competition for eyeballs, since unlike the Internet, you can only watch one channel at a time. I think, with the whole idea of mass reruns, that cable is taking a page from the Internet in that stations don't have to necessarily compete over the same time slot.
