Another story I've been sitting on for a bit, though much less detailed than yesterday's, may affect many more people. The television business is dying. Or so said Henry Blodget, CEO of Business Insider. If you know that name you might be remembering that Blodget got himself perma-banned from the securities industry for civil fraud in 2003. He also writes for other publications like Slate and Newsweek, mostly doing what he did in the securities business: predicting.

In June he predicted that the television business was on the verge of collapse. In particular, Blodget argues that the television industry is following the same fatal mistakes that the newspaper business made in the past decade, confusing increases in things like viewer numbers for a sustainable revenue model. In particular, Blodget zeroes in on the way that digitization (both Web and digital cable/DVR) have changed our relationship with advertisements, which are the major source of television revenue. No shock to anyone who's paying attention: we don't watch ads.

The problem isn't limited to broadcast channels, which are generally free to receive and almost wholly supported by ad revenue - cable channels that depend on subscription revenue are also likely in trouble as people start ditching their cable lines the way they have been ditching their landline phones. This isn't an immediate problem, but if you project out ten years into the future I agree with Blodget - there's not much reason for people to keep their cable subscriptions. Shows come over the Web, particularly because that enables people to watch on whatever screen happens to be in front of them, be it television set, desktop PC, or tablet. New competitors (iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu) are taking aim at the money that Blodget notes is currently being "wasted" on cable subscriptions. These new competitors will also give us more on-demand options, and cater more to our schedules.

Blodget argues that it's often specific things, particularly sporting events, that are keeping more people from cutting the cord. As Matt Lewis noted in response to Blodget's piece, this is also particularly bad news for cable news channels. We neither need nor particularly want a cable-channel authority to keep us current, particularly when they can't even get the result of a major Supreme Court ruling correct.

I "watched" the ACA decision via Twitter and the SCOTUSblog live stream. Those sources had it right. I didn't need a talking head on a screen to tell me what was going on, and I sure don't need to pay thousands of dollars a year for 500 channels I never watch.

Coda: One reason I hadn't posted this story yet was that I was waiting for someone to refute Blodget's numbers, to show where his reasoning was wrong. Instead, I got a notification that HBO has decided it doesn't want Web subscribers' money. Really, HBO? Your response to a campaign of people who are trying to give you money is "no, go away, we don't want your cash." If Blodget is right, and I believe he is, then the television business will have nobody to blame but themselves when their fire sales and funerals roll around.