Things are in transition, and it is going to be a slow grind. Why would you expect cable companies to start acting before they have to? They're still making plenty o' money on the 'old' model.
They won't change until the absolute last second, if even then.
That's the problem, the last second is too late. The time to change is before the competition has built up momentum. If you wait until big shifts in marketshare are taking place then you will not have enough time to respond. It's a matter of acceleration and momentum, if you wait until the brick wall is right in front of you it won't be possible to generate enough acceleration to change momentum fast enough to avoid hitting it.
This is especially true in the case of big companies that are much less agile than their competition. The traditional tv companies are facing a very similar fate as the newspapers, they just don't know it yet.
Here's the way I view it. If any industry or business can be potentially disrupted by a tech company in the next decade or two, they will. I think to bet otherwise is naive. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that all currently entrenched interests are going to go away, obviously not, but most of them are going to end up in a fight for their lives at some point, and many of them will end up losing.
So many businesses today are profitable because they have a monopoly or oligopoly on some aspect of a supply chain. The onset of ubiquitous computing, network connectivity, automated manufacturing (3D printing et al), and so forth will disintermediate damned near everyone. A lot of those intermediaries have become fat, lazy, and myopic due to how easy it has been to hold onto their business up until now, for the most part they won't know what hit them until it's far too late to do anything about it.
They won't change until the absolute last second, if even then.