On Monday, shortly after Brian Roberts announced his intention to split Comcast and NBCUniversal into their own pure-play companies—the latest tectonic shift in the industry’s long and protracted dismantling—he stressed to investors that this was “absolutely not” a prelude to future mergers and acquisitions. Needless to say, dear reader, absolutely no one believes that.

After all, the split—which sent Comcast’s long-impotent stock soaring as much as 20 percent in premarket trading—is not merely an admission that Brian’s 15-year-long pipes-plus-programming convergence strategy has run its course. It’s also a recognition that both sides of his business are vulnerable and need optionality for consolidation in their respective industries—i.e., to execute on an M&A path while suggesting they might do otherwise. Either way, this creates a host of new strategic possibilities for both Comcast and NBCUniversal, all of which will make for great conversation fodder at next week’s Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley. (See you at Konditorei!)

On the cable-broadband side, new Comcast chief Michael Angelakis could explore an acquisition of Charter, which saw its own stock jump 14 percent on the news. That potential combination would unlock the synergies of the nation’s two largest cable providers at a time when they need scale to fend off mounting pressure from wireless and satellite operators, including Elon Musk’s Starlink. Charter, which is currently in the process of acquiring Cox Communications, is already on the consolidation track; a deal as large as Comcast-Charter would need to jump through a number of federal and state regulatory hurdles.

Meanwhile, NBCUniversal will become an obvious acquisition target. In anticipation of that role, NBCU’s new C.E.O., Mike Cavanagh, may position it as a buyer of smaller assets like Lionsgate or Starz as a means of bulking it up for its own eventual sale—much as Shari Redstone spent years doing as a buyer at Paramount before becoming a seller. Obviously, that didn’t work as well, but Cavanagh is a remarkable operator. He spent years at JPMorgan Chase, where he was the co-head of investment banking and a one-time potential Dimon successor, before joining Carlyle and eventually landing at Comcast. Shari’s chief corporate achievement up to then was wresting control of Paramount away from her father’s girlfriends. Anyway, don’t let Brian or Mike’s insistence on that point obscure the broader trajectory.

So, who might buy NBCUniversal? Ted Sarandos just made a play for Warner Bros. Discovery and lost out to the Ellisons. Presumably, Netflix will take a look at NBC’s streaming and studio assets, which would give them another avenue to formidable I.P., a content library, top-tier NFL and NBA rights, and a theme parks business—all for a much nicer price. (One can’t help but wonder if the Ellisons would have preferred that deal.) Amazon and Apple will presumably take a look, too, though they also don’t want linear assets. In the most likely scenario, NBCUniversal would spin those off and pass them to private equity, which could break them up and sell the pieces in a multiple arbitrage situation.

This is all a ways away, of course—it will take Brian a year to unwind these companies—and it’s hard to know what the downstream effects would be for the likes of NBC Sports or NBC News until we actually know the buyer. That said, the longer NBC remains independent, the more vulnerable those assets become. Indeed, those aforementioned NFL and NBA rights require the balance sheet, distribution platform, and promotional ecosystem of a much larger company to justify their escalating cost. Without Comcast, those economics become harder to defend—all of which makes Netflix not only a rational potential acquirer, but perhaps the preferred exit option, too.

In any event, the split, while seismic in significance, feels long overdue. The synergies that once existed between broadband infrastructure and entertainment no longer exist, which left Brian with two fundamentally different businesses in need of separate strategies—and, eventually, different dance partners. Recall how, five months ago, Cavanagh himself suggested that there wasn’t a strategic advantage to separating these two businesses, and that NBC “doesn’t get stronger by being smaller or as a stand-alone entity.” Presumably, he still feels the same way.