• by Aaron Baar , August 11, 2016

Forget all the dire warnings about cord-cutting. The prospects for the cable industry look pretty good for the next decade. 

In its latest report, SNL Kagan, a division of S&P Global Market Intelligence, projects residential revenues will increase more than $9 billion between 2016 and 2026, while commercial services will increase just over $10 billion over that same period. The reason: a growing reliance on broadband offerings, to which the cable companies have tied themselves. 

“Compared to other multi-channel platforms, cable companies have segued into other products. It’s not just video anymore,” Tony Lenoir, research analyst at SNL Kagan, tells Marketing Daily. “A lot of cable operators have been shifting away to the broadband side, and on that side, things have been fantastic.”

Indeed, SNL Kagan predicts basic video services will decline by a combined annual growth of 1.5%, while broadband subscriptions will increase at more than 1.6 times that rate.

“There’s still quite a few rural areas where broadband is not available, and they’re laying new networks,” Lenoir says of the growth opportunities. “We’ve entered a broadband world, and there’s no turning back.”

Though the projections are promising, there’s still a looming threat that wireless services could encroach upon cable’s Internet territory. As wireless providers move toward a more advanced 5G platform, it’s possible consumers will switch to a mobile-only Internet, much as they did with cell phones, once the signals were able to compete with landlines. 

“If [wireless providers] can compete with the wireline connections, that would be something to worry about,” Lenoir says.