Cable's Lost Its Appeal

Can you believe this downfall of cable? It's amazing to me that you could have a company like Comcast (CMCSA - commentary - Cramer's Take) (get a load of that awful earnings report) or Time Warner (TWX - commentary - Cramer's Take) just drip down every day even though there is no real sign that the dish or Verizon (VZ - commentary - Cramer's Take) or AT&T (T - commentary - Cramer's Take) is making that much progress in taking share. More important, there is real evidence that cable's still getting more and more out of each customer.

But it has never mattered. Cable was meant to be a monopoly. It is why we were always willing to own the stocks. Because as long as it was a monopoly, as long as they were the dominating basic service suppliers of the future, you could own them.

Now we have enough competition that they have to pay up for programming. Now we have enough in the ether to watch -- as Pali Research analyst Rich Greenfield writes elegantly in his piece about the irrelevance of cable -- that the monopoly is shot to heck. And we aren't going to get takeovers in cable anymore; all these companies are too big. They're out of room.

There was a moment not that long ago when Comcast was adding customers who were paying more and more money, and it looked like that foray into trying to buy Disney (DIS - commentary - Cramer's Take) was needless. Now Comcast has to spend to keep those customers as they pay more and more for content. Where's Disney when you need it?

We talk about banks being toxic. At least they offer us dividends while we are wait, even if it's for Godot. I don't know what cable's offering right now. But whatever it is, it ain't working.

At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in any of the stocks mentioned.

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