&gt; Furthermore are cable customers really Al Jazeera&#x27;s target audience?<p>I think it was purely a business decision.  The way the US cable model works is the content providers get however many cents a month per subscriber that has the channel.  The individual amount isn&#x27;t great, but the cable company does all the hard work of collecting the money and giving you a single nice bigger cheque.<p>It also helps with advertising, because they can now give aggregate demographic information to their advertisers such as income levels, locations, and others based on correlation (eg age).  Advertisers really don&#x27;t want to pay for non-target users.  For example if targeting women in their 30s, they aren&#x27;t going to pay for ads going to males in their 60s.  The problem with Internet streaming is getting any demographic information, especially if you don&#x27;t already have it (eg Google and especially Facebook do).  This can be somewhat addressed by requiring accounts to view, but that is a big burden for getting new viewers (who wants a new account to view something you have never seen before?)<p>Ben Thompson of Stratechery (good site and reporting BTW) has a nice overiew article on the US cable tv ecosystem:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;changing-unchanging-structure-tv&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;changing-unchanging-structure-t...</a>