"When ESPN was adding subscribers, the $6.50 per-month-per-subscriber it charges to every cable operator meant $78 of additional annual profit for each new subscriber. This is a wonderful thing until a network starts losing customers, at which point all the revenue from every lost subscriber is chopped right out of that same network’s net profits."

This sounds like a "collapse of complex societies" in which the Roman Empire can expand as long as there are increasing returns to complexification, but collapses when the yields of complexification plateau and there is instead declining marginal productivity. http://www.historytoday.com/christopher-chippindale/collapse...