Given the rumors that Comcast (s cmcsa) is talking with regulators to see if it could find a way to buy Time Warner Cable (s twc) and that Liberty Media’s John Malone is eyeing some kind of Charter and Time Warner Cable tie up, this summer’s hand-wringing over cable consolidation is still in play.

As my colleague Om Malik explained in a post in July, Malone may have set this off, but it is an opportune time for the industry to consolidate given the demand for broadband generated by over-the-top services such as Netflix and Hulu. The cable guys don’t compete against each other in a given geographic footprint, but instead, against the telcos. And when it comes to broadband, the telcos are losing. As Om wrote back in July:

But the future isn’t about linear, old-styled video. Instead, it is about broadband and broadband-enabled video. The cable…