The comments on IP winning are fine, but from the application experience, CableTV is far better than what we are converging on.

The internet is converging on a few major players streaming low quality content , at a higher price, using 100x the resources of cable TV.

We were streaming 500 HDTV channels for $50 / month around 2005. Now similar content would cost you $100 in internet service + $150-$200 in streaming fees. And you need much more sophisticated and numerous ICs for encode-decode.

My point is , you can't judge a mature product against an evolving product . The entire content ecosystem is much worse off. We basically spent trillions of dollars to rebuild the shitty content delivery of cableTV , with worse content.