Cable at least made sense on paper (if not obvious to the consumer). The channels were independent companies, they pay for the rights to content and get paid by ads. But they had the problem of how to actually get their feed into your home (over the air broadcast was the only D2C option).

The cable provider was just a delivery mechanism. So you pay them to deliver the feeds. But they didn’t get any revenue from the content providers (or their ads).

In other words, two different companies, two different services (content vs delivery), and two different revenue models.