When Bob Miron passed away at 89, the industry paused to honor a pioneer of the golden age of cable. We look back at guys like Miron with a certain sepia-toned nostalgia. They were the scrappy entrepreneurs who strung wires across towns, won brutal local franchise battles, and brought the world into our living rooms.
But while we’re busy mourning the death of cable TV, we’re completely missing what these pioneers actually built.
The internet didn’t kill cable; it just moved the bottleneck from your television to your router.
You probably think the legacy of the cable era is HBO, ESPN, or MTV. It’s not. The real legacy of cable pioneers like Miron is the last-mile bottleneck—the physical wire running into your house that gives a handful of mega-corporations absolute control over your access to the internet.
Miron operated in a fragmented, hyper-competitive era. Independent operators were fighting for every neighborhood. But over the decades, the networks these builders painstakingly constructed were consolidated into the massive incumbents we know today. The scrappy operators were erased, replaced by corporate monoliths.
And that’s the tragedy of infrastructure. The physical wire doesn’t care about disruption. It doesn’t care about Web3, AI, or the metaverse. It just sits there, a permanent moat.
You don’t pay Comcast or Spectrum for entertainment; you pay them for the right to exist in the modern digital economy.
We love to talk about the software revolution, but the hardware beneath our feet dictates everything. Miron and his generation built the roads. They connected communities. But those roads were eventually sold to a single tollbooth operator who realized they never had to lower prices or innovate again.
So, when we remember the cable pioneers, don’t just remember the shows they brought us. Remember the wires they laid. Because those wires are exactly why you have one, maybe two, terrible options for internet access today.
We mourn the pioneers of connection, but we are living in the monopolies they accidentally built.
FAQ
Q: Weren't these companies just naturally better and won the market?
A: No, they won the physical infrastructure and local franchise rights, making it legally and financially impossible for new entrants to dig up the streets again.
Q: Why does this matter to me if my internet works fine?
A: Because a lack of competition means you pay higher prices for slower speeds compared to the rest of the developed world, and you have zero leverage when service drops.
Q: Is the only solution breaking up these massive cable companies?
A: It's either aggressive structural separation of physical infrastructure from service providers, or massive public investment in open-access fiber networks to bypass the old cable monopolies entirely.