Hasn't the same been true for premium cable channels for a long time?

I think cable tv is much simpler to deliver as you only have a few channels. Netflix has tens of thousands of videos so they can't just broadcast everything (I don't think cable TV is broadcasting all their channels either, I don't know how they do it in practice).

> (I don't think cable TV is broadcasting all their channels either, I don't know how they do it in practice)

Actually they do. Just a whole lot of MPEG-PS, several of which multiplexed into a single frequency channel (sometime called transponder channel, even in the context of cable, although the term comes from satcom), and then on the order of hundreds of frequency channels between 100MHz to 1000MHz (roughly speaking, it depends on the regulatory domain, frequency allocations, and doesn't stretch all the way to the limits of the range).

Thanks for the insight !