Why your cable company might be happy to see you stop subscribing to its TV service: Data Caps.

If your cable operator invites you to dump its TV service and switch to online streaming, its internet rates may hide a surprise that will be painful to you and profitable to your internet provider. Data caps limiting how much you can download per month are an unpleasant reality at too many providers, but small cable services can be significantly less generous with them. Those same companies also have the hardest time keeping programming costs in check and increasingly lose money on video. "(A)mong smaller cable operators, it has become commonplace to stop even trying to preserve the video subscriber base," a MoffettNathanson Research study observed.