You may have already heard the good news: Cable—yes, that cable—just recorded its first quarter of net subscriber growth since late 2017. Net subs actually rose by more than 300,000 in the third quarter, driven almost exclusively by virtual doppelgängers like YouTube TV, according to analysis from MoffettNathanson. More specifically, the surge was likely due to a flurry of skinny bundle signups going into the fall sports season: college football, the NFL, hockey, basketball. But when you consider that more than 1 million customers canceled their cable service in the previous quarter, and close to 2.5 million canceled in Q1, the net gain is, well, something.

Now everyone is running diagnostics and trying to understand exactly what happened. Is the growth just a happy little blip amid a continued downward trend? After all, Q3 is always the best quarter for cable, followed by significant churn in Q1. But among the executives I talk to, there’s reason to believe that cable may have found its bottom… for now.

Of course, these conflicts between content providers and distributors have really come to a head over the question of ingestion—the word of the year in recent carriage disputes. In short, virtual pay TV operators are racing to fend off streaming competitors by incorporating partner content directly into their apps—while those partners are also fighting to make more of their best content exclusive to their own platforms.

The stakes are material on both sides. YouTube TV, for example, has increased its price by more than 130 percent since it was introduced in 2017. It has also become the third-largest cable provider in the country, with roughly 10 million customers, behind Charter and Comcast. When the leagues were mostly working with traditional media players, YouTube only had to worry about striking the right deal with the right partners. Now though, the leagues are leaning into streaming just like everyone else, and sports are really working. The Canelo vs. Crawford fight on Netflix drove just over 238,000 signups in the U.S. in September, according to Antenna. (Wednesday, for its part, drove 79,000.)

For virtual cable platforms like YouTube TV, which has been at the center of the ingestion conversation, winning the ingestion fight isn’t only about building a moat; it’s also about providing a better customer experience in an age when it’s still so damn hard to find games across so many streaming platforms. A similar logic undergirds Amazon’s push to build out its Prime Video Channels ecosystem, which turns Prime Video into a one-stop hub for add-on services (Paramount+, Peacock, Apple TV, etcetera). It’s also why Roku C.E.O. Anthony Wood is investing heavily in reducing confusion around sports discovery, and why Apple TV now sends push notifications alerting viewers when there’s a “close game.” Meanwhile, linear TV is still the simplest way to find every sport and every game in the same place.

Thanks, Julia. See you all on Thursday.
John