Despite what you've read, cord-cutting isn't a threat. But ...

The reason you haven't seen me writing about the phenomenon of "cordcutting" -- ending one's cable subscription and watching all TV shows online -- is that I hadn't seen much more than anecdotal evidence of it happening, often in the household of the journalist writing the story. (Cordcutting was the Twitter story before Twitter.)

Indeed, fourth quarter data cited by Cable Tech Talk shows the number of video subscriptions going up, not down -- it's just that people are switching to alternative providers like AT&T and Verizon for their multichannel needs.

But even if cordcutting started to happen on a significant scale, I assumed cable operators would simply yank the free content off their websites. Now Brian Stelter has confirmed my suspicions with this story in today's Times.

This tactic of requiring online viewers of cable shows to subscribe, in one form or another, has been under discussion for a while inside the industry. Here's an article from November by Will Richmond that details why the cable operators are closing ranks, and why they might succeed in preserving the golden goose of subscriptions.

Cable operators, as Richmond points out, have distinct advantages over newspapers, even though both have business models based on bundling.

Cable also differs from print in the way it extracts value from the bundle of content it sells. Whereas subscriptions only make up about 10 to 15 percent of a newspaper's revenue, they are the golden goose for cable and satellite operators. Any loss in online advertising would almost certainly be worth preserving high subscription levels. The money quote in Stelter's story comes from former HBO chief, now top Time Warner executive Jeff Bewkes: “If people aren’t subscribing to the programming, you probably shouldn’t put it online, because then half of the financial support goes away. That isn’t good. It hasn’t been good for the newspaper industry.”

Also, cable still pretty much acts like a cartel. Its leaders have known each other for decades, they rarely compete in markets, and they share crucial information. As a block, they can exert tremendous force over programmers to keep them from bypassing cable and taking their shows straight to online. (You wanna do that? Fine -- do it without the revenue of 70 million cable subscriptions.) And don't count on Congress to jump in and mediate; it's been loathe to meddle ever since the Al Gore train wreck known as the 1992 Cable Act, which was supposed to lower people's cable bills but wound up driving them higher.

Still, if cord-cutting isn't shaking the cable world to its foundations, why are executives in the industry so eager to fight cord-cutting? Well, a number of reasons. Here are just a few of the factors likely keeping members of the cable cartel up late at night:

The sheer amount of video out there is making cable programming less valuable. Despite what you read about simultaneous TV-and-Internet usage, I haven't seen much evidence of simultaneous video consumption going on. An hour spent watching YouTube, Vimeo, FunnyOrDie.com, TalkingPointsMemo.com or Breitbart.TV means an hour not spent watching TV.

Posting video to the Internet generates publicity and blog chatter for some programs. Not for nothing did "The Daily Show" make its entire library of clips available for free viewing. Also, I believe many so-called copyright violations that result in video being taken down from YouTube and other sites could be effectively challenged by bloggers under recent interpretations in fair use law, as I've documented before.

Casual TV watchers are subscribing to services which make the "best" programs available on demand, reducing their need to see the "newest." Netflix is emphasizing recent TV-on-DVD titles among its 12,000 titles that subscribers can download to TiVos or other compatible devices. With the rapid release of most TV shows on DVD, a cordcutter is usually only about one season behind a current hit. Or in the case of shows like "The Wire," the consumer just orders up all the seasons and watches them at once -- instead of watching live TV.

Top content producers may choose to live online. The creators of "South Park" own their own Internet channel, in effect, at their website. It doesn't happen too often, but a powerful television brand could set its own rules and offer full episodes to everyone, regardless of what cable operators think of it.

Some cable programmers will go rogue and dare operators to cut them off. I'm thinking Viacom here, which holds the large cluster of MTV Networks and has had historically prickly relationships with cable operators. Fox, which controls the FSN channels, Nat Geo, Speed and of course Fox News, and is no longer in the domestic satellite business, could also break ranks.

So, good luck with that circling-wagons strategy, cable. We'll be watching.