As I have been spouting for a while, telcos are getting into TV (and spending billions to do it) too late. The TV market is saturated - DirecTV, DISH, cable, telco and OTT. The economy isn't helping either as people ditch landlines and TV for mobile and Internet (bundles that the ISP's just don't seem to want to sell for some strange reason).

The cablecos tried wireless, but have dropped that notion in lieu of just partnering with Sprint (and Clearwire) again. (Still no Quad-Bundle actively being advertised.) The mobile and broadband space are both growing slowly (if at all). So where will growth come from?

For MSO's, the SMB space. [Even Bloomberg agrees.] The ILEC's - especially Ma and Pa Bell - have given up on small business. This leaves a great opportunity for regional CLEC's and cablecos to target and win that market. For cable, it's all about delivering cheap bandwidth and cheaper voice. The voice revenue is free money for them. (And money that keeps slipping out of the ILEC pocket.)

TWC made an interesting move in buying Navisite. It opens up the world of hosting, I mean Cloud, to the cableco. It gives them an edge in chasing B2B services, if they train their sales force on how to sell it. Selling transport and transit is easy. It's mainly upgrades and replacement services. But Cloud and managed services are a whole different ball of wax. At least 2 cablecos - Cox and Comcast - have jumped into the Hosted PBX space. The one advantage an MSO has over another cloud comm provider like Packet8 is that the MSO owns the network and can deliver quality of service on hosted PBX (or other cloud apps).

The Bloomberg article mentions that Cox is going to build its own electronic medical records platform. That too is an interesting move.

The article mentions that Ma and Pa Bell have bigger network footprints. Cablecos are inter-connecting. BHN and Comcast have NNI's in Florida. Soon the top 7 MSO's will be inter-networked enough to sell to most of the US.

This gives agents and VAR's a great opportunity to sell to the SMB space again. How Cloud will fit into this, we will just have to wait and see, but things could get interesting in 2012.