MLB could take this as good news or bad news (they are in the cable business, after all), but long-term it will be a huge positive. From Bits:
For most New Yorkers, moving into a new home means calling Con Edison, Verizon and the cable company. But some younger New Yorkers are no longer paying for cable television and instead watching their favorite shows, movies and videos online and from on-demand delivery services like Netflix.
These early adopters are taking advantage of a growing number of Web sites like Hulu and software including Boxee, which stream many programs available on Cablevision, Time Warner Cable and Comcast, often at no charge.
Cost-benefit analyses aside, this is going to be a slow process. People still pay for landline phones and AOL dialup service; when something becomes engrained, most people don’t even realize that letting it go is an option.
But cable is so expensive, and internet video is so cheap, that at some point this was inevitable. The real question is whether this becomes a popular move amongst people that aren’t making much money, or young people that don’t see the need for 800 channels when most of what they want is on the web anyway.
Three things probably need to happen to make IPTV fully viable: 1) broadband speeds need to increase, at least to 4G standards; 2) all live sports games need to be streamed; 3) videos need to be easily accessible on a television, and not just on a PC. If certain cable channels were available online on an a la carte basis (i.e. ESPN, CNBC, TBS, Comedy Central, etc), that’s icing on the cake.
As each of these steps become reality, we should see people defecting from cable at an accelerating pace. That is, unless the cable providers change their model (i.e. making it a la carte), or drastically cut prices. But even then, cable might just end up being a niche player (for HDTV shows, etc.) if broadband speeds improve enough.
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