The rise and fall of cable

This year's stumble by cable stocks, which are down about 25% even after last week's FCC-inspired rally, continues to puzzle me.

The industry has done a far better job than its chief rivals, the telcos, of delivering triple-play bundles to the majority of its customers and has already made significant inroads in signing up voice customers. Yet Wall Street is apparently convinced that AT&T and Verizon pose a significant threat to cable's video franchise revenues.

Granted, AT&T says it will be adding 10,000 video customers a week by year's end, but by the third quarter of this year, the company had 586,000 total video customers, including both U-verse and its DISH satellite resale. Verizon had 1.5 million video customers, 717,000 of which had FiOS TV.

Those are not industry-crushing numbers, by any means.

Wall Street has maintained a skeptical attitude toward cable for some time, an attitude that seemed to change in 2005-2006, when investors woke up to the fact that cable was positioned to bludgeon its telco rivals with VoIP services.

Now, cable has set its sights on small businesses, an area where the big guys are known to be weak.

Cox announced today that it has signed its 200,000th business customer. While Cox has been selling business services longer than its cable brethren, that was also true for voice, and yet the rest of the cable industry caught up.

One reason I think cable is able to respond well to such challenges is that it is still able to work together as an industry since, by and large, cable companies don't compete with each other. On the flip side of that coin, however, Wall Street tends to view the companies monolithically as well, driving down stocks across the board when one company stumbles.

I expect to see cable bounce back from the current woes. I wonder if Wall Street is going to be caught unaware once more.

E-mail me at cwilson3@telephonyonline.com.