Several news sources this week covered the formal disintegration of Sprint’s partnership with the cable companies, which had been marketed under the brand name Pivot. This news was a long time coming, and neither Sprint nor the cable companies had been investing in the service for some time.

In fact, it seemed as if none of the companies really ever invested anything significant in the venture beyond the initial outlay to set up the entity which ran it. Cable company call center representatives were not apparently paid commission on Pivot sales and thus had very little incentive to sell the service when they had plenty of other options to pursue with their customers. It also never really made it out of the initial test markets.

There clearly are people who want to watch TV on their handsets, and there are even people (myself included) who would like to be able to set their DVRs from their cellphones. But that doesn’t mean they want a service which revolves around those features. And they especially don’t want a service which feels like it is tied down to a particular feature set and a secondary relationship which they may or may not want to keep over the long term.

This is the same problem which doomed Mobile ESPN - people want ESPN content on their phones (the Sports Center audience numbers don’t lie, and they pretty much all have cellphones), but they first and foremost want great phone service, good prices, attractive devices, good customer service and so on. Then they want to be able to layer that other stuff on top, and add and remove it as necessary over time, whether for financial reasons or just because something better has come along.

Even though mobile services tied into quad plays from telcos have been more successful, they haven’t been hugely so, and it comes down to the same reason. People want to make an individual decision about mobile phones that is decoupled from the other decisions they make about communications and media services they subscribe to. The two-year contracts they’re locked into are quite enough restriction for most people, and they don’t want any more.

It appears the cable companies realize that, and perhaps always have. Although the logic of the partnership was sound at a high level - the cable companies have everything except wireless, and Sprint had only wireless, in a world which appears to be moving towards bundles - but that logic breaks down once you get into the details. People are buying bundles, but they’re buying bundles of home services and not typically bundles including mobile.

The cable companies, though, still feel they need a play in wireless, if not because of the bundling trend, then for two other reasons: other companies are offering mobile TV services, which may erode their share at the margins, and because they are experiencing the same slow-down in their core business that is driving the telcos in their bid for TV- and mobile-driven growth. They need wireless as a source of growth, even if not a source of higher ARPU from each individual customer.

As such, it appears they’re making some moves to get back into the wireless market via a more direct route. Having acquired AWS spectrum, some of them also acquired 700MHz spectrum in the recent auction.
There have been unofficial rumors that the cable companies may be planning to do a deal with Google, Sprint and Clearwire to build a national WiMAX network. And Comcast has apparently hired the former CTO of Telefonica O2 Europe to investigate options for the company’s wireless strategy.

There’s no telling at this point whether they will be successful this time around - joint ventures are notoriously bad at working out. But with the cable companies more in control of their own destinies they probably have a better chance with this than they did with Pivot.