Back when I was a kid, a half-century ago, most people saw only three TV networks — CBS, NBC and ABC.

If you’re old enough to remember the DuMont network, please check out my recent gallery on dividend stocks that provide solid retirement income. If you think of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (NASDAQ:FOXA) as the fourth network, read on.

A quarter-century ago, when my children were small, a host of cable networks rose to challenge the broadcast networks for viewers. It was the age of “57 channels and nothing on” with ESPN, the USA Network, CNN, the Weather Channel and the Food Network all having their heyday.

Over time, the broadcasters bought out most of the new operators, sometimes after being bought themselves. CBS Corporation (NYSE:CBS) now owns Showtime and the Smithsonian Network. Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ:CMCSA), the parent of NBC, owns all or part of a dozen networks, including CNBC, Syfy and USA. Walt Disney Co (NYSE:DIS), the parent of ABC, owns ESPN, the biggest franchise of all, and the Disney networks. And Fox, which grew up in this era, has clones for nearly all of them.

But in the 2010s, a new force has arisen to challenge the network owners, a force they will find difficult to compete with and almost impossible to buy.

That force is streaming services, which deliver their shows to your TV, over the internet through plug-in dongles rather than set-top boxes — unless you prefer viewing on a PC, tablet or phone. These offer all the entertainment a TV zombie might ever need, and the services can cost less than $10 per month, much less than a cable service. They don’t have schedules, so you watch what you want to watch, when you want to watch it.

Streaming through the internet is the future of TV, and we are just at its dawn. It’s still unclear how we will discover shows, how we will interface with what we want to watch or how much we’ll eventually pay for the privilege of watching. But cable, at least as we knew it, is drifting away, as broadcast television previously drifted away. It will continue to exist, as broadcasting does, just in a smaller, truncated form.

What is the future of live events in the new world? Is TV even going to remain a one-way, passive medium? We don’t know.

In addition to being better, and cheaper, for viewers, the new TV environment right now looks great for entertainers and show producers, who suddenly have a host of new options on where and how to sell their wares, which they’re using to gain new creative freedom if not new wealth.

But the new media landscape is a lot less stable than the old one and, given the wealth of choices available, it may prove much less lucrative for stars, writers and producers.

Just a few years into the new era, moreover, it’s apparent that the new streaming companies are big enough to regard the cable networks’ owners as minnows. This is not a problem the networks can buy their way out of, as they bought out of cable.

Your mission, as an investor, is to examine the new TV stocks and decide whether to invest your money in them. And along the way, you will be buying a lot more than TV.

Stocks to Buy for the Future of TV: Netflix (NFLX)

The business model of the new TV era was created by Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX).

A decade ago, Netflix was a relatively small but interesting company that mailed DVDs. You paid a monthly fee to hold a few, then got more when you sent them back. It was a relatively simple business based on physical media, but it had potential.

By simply moving that business model online, using cloud services and open-source technology, Netflix now delivers unlimited amounts of content to viewers as a stream, rather than on a disk.

Cofounder Reed Hastings has transformed TV as no one has since Ted Turner. If you bought Netflix when it went public in 2002, your $1 investment is now worth $137.

Hasting’s second big innovation, which came on the heels of the streaming business model, was to start funding his own programming rather than just reselling existing movies and TV shows. His string of hits began with House of Cards, based on a British mini-series, which by itself made his monthly $8 per month subscription fee seem a bargain.

Netflix offers its shareholders low profit margins, but great growth. Between 2013 and 2016, revenue doubled, from $4.37 billion to $8.83 billion, and profits nearly followed, from 26 cents per share to 43 cents. Along the way, the company has increased its debt dramatically — it now represents about one-fourth of assets — to pay for its delivery infrastructure and to obtain new programming assets, which it is assumed will retain their value over time. (Your grandkids will watch House of Cards the way your kids now watch M*A*S*H.)

With a market cap of $62 billion, Netflix could now buy other TV stocks, like CBS. Its value exceeds that of Fox. ABC and NBC are protected from a Netflix acquisition by deep-pocketed parents, Disney and Comcast. HBO, a subscription service based on cable, will be protected in the same way once parent Time Warner Inc (NYSE:TWX) is bought by AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T).

NFLX retains its value as an investment because of its international operations, which by the fourth quarter of 2016 represented around 40% of the total and continue to grow. In the last three months of 2016 alone the company added 7.05 million new members, after forecasting it would add just 5.2 million. Netflix’ growth is accelerating, and its ability to buy must-see programming is growing with it.

The problem for Netflix is that the cloud providers on which its success rests have seen what it has done. They’re on to the trick. A network today isn’t necessarily just a provider of content, but the scaled infrastructure necessary to provide that content. The owners of cloud networks and vast internet networks are copying what Netflix does.

These challengers have more zeroes in their asset bases than those NFLX has faced before. Once more, Reed Hastings is a minnow in a sea of sharks.

Everything about the industry has changed, but whether Netflix can ride the changes, or whether it will eventually be bought out as Turner was, remains up for debate.

Stocks to Buy for the Future of TV: Amazon (AMZN)

There is a price cheaper than Netflix’ $8 per month for all-you-can-eat entertainment — the nothing extra I pay Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) to access its video as a Prime member.

It is true that you can buy Amazon Prime Video, separately, for $8.99 per month. But that’s silly since the regular price for Prime, which includes free two-day shipping on most Amazon items, is $99 per year (about $8.25 per month).

Lately, Amazon has also been outperforming Netflix on the awards front. In addition to 11 Golden Globe nominations this year alone, there are six Oscar nominations for Manchester by the Sea (Amazon paid $10 million for the distribution rights a year ago).

Frankly there is so much free stuff on Amazon (which I can watch on a big screen with my Fire Stick, a wireless dongle that fits on the side of the TV, connects to the internet via WiFi, and supports a host of other services including Netflix) that I don’t need anything else. Were it not for live sports, I would kill my cable in a heartbeat, and as my favorite sports sign streaming contracts, that motivation is disappearing as well.

And it’s not just TV either. I’m fortunate enough to have a wife who hates TV. She reads instead. Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, for another $99 per year, became fantastic over the last year as more authors have signed up and Amazon’s algorithms have gotten better at anticipating what people might want to borrow next from its vast library.

My son doesn’t watch TV either. He’s a gamer, and has been for years. He is constantly talking about Twitch, which offers live streams of people playing video games. I don’t get it, but Amazon does. They paid $970 million for Twitch last March, making them partners with characters such as Bunnyfufu, who stream their gaming on Twitch.

Like most people, I watch very few cable channels. Cancel cable and there is $100-150 per month I can pay for whatever programming I want. There are only so many hours in a day — who needs hundreds of channels with nothing on when a streaming service (or maybe two) can meet my needs?

If I sound like an Amazon fanboy, it’s because I am. As previously noted, my TV has an Amazon Fire Stick plugged into it, and I use a Fire tablet for reading. I also started accumulating Amazon shares in 2014, at an average price of $330. They’re now worth about $800, and they’re a bargain at that price.

For the fourth quarter of 2016 Amazon earned $749 million, $1.54 per share, on revenues of $43.741 billion. It is making the turn from a company investing in front of growth to one that starts earning profits regularly. Its cloud operation, Amazon Web Services, now brings one-quarter of its $3.5 billion in quarterly revenue to the bottom line — and one of its customers is Netflix.

Imagine. Amazon creates infrastructure that lets other companies make money, then competes with its customers to make even more money with the same infrastructure. I recently dumped shares before earnings, at $832 per share, because they had become such a huge portion of my retirement account.

I may have to buy them back.

Stocks to Buy for the Future of TV: Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL)

Netflix may have created the new business model and Amazon may have perfected it, but the technology began at Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL, NASDAQ:GOOG), with Google and YouTube.

One of YouTube’s co-founders says the idea started after the Janet Jackson “wardobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl. They just couldn’t find any video of it, and so asked others to upload it so they could see it. The service was an immediate sensation, and Google’s purchase of the site for $1.65 billion was just the beginning.

The business model was simple. People upload videos, people watch videos. Google places ads in front of the videos, and shares some of the revenue with those who uploaded the videos. Like Google itself, it is a free service, although it now has a paid version called YouTube Red.

YouTube did not make a profit for its parent until after Amazon and Netflix got going. It is now estimated to be bringing in $10 billion per year, growing at 40% per year, with 80% of views outside the U.S. By 2020 that will mean $27 billion in revenue per year. Its audience is tilted toward young people, aged 18-34, the kind advertisers most covet, and a growing percentage access it via phones or tablets.

An analysis from STL Partners indicates YouTube’s profit contribution is mainly indirect. Its traffic helps Google get the best prices for internet bandwidth. Its meta data is contributed to other Google services. It gives Google a place at the table whenever video copyright issues are discussed.

Veteran TV producer Susanne Daniels joined Google in 2015, and is charged with growing the YouTube Red service. She is not only buying TV shows and making a splash at movie festivals but aiming to take veteran TV hosts like Conan O’Brien online. (Chelsea Handler has already moved to Netflix.) Daniels is helped by continuing sales of Chromecast, a TV streaming device which competes with the Apple Fire Stick

YouTube has created its own stars, most of whom are unknown to their parents’ generation. The most popular YouTube celebrity, PewDiePie, drew $15 million in income last year and had almost 50 million viewers.

By taking advantage of Google’s low-cost infrastructure, YouTube has carved out a unique niche for itself in the new TV universe, one that is subsidizing its entrance into more “traditional” areas like YouTube Red subscriptions.

Thanks to Amazon’s purchase of Twitch, TV stocks Google and Amazon are now on a collision course in the world of streaming video. Customers of both will be the big winners, but stockholders should do well, too.

Stocks to Buy for the Future of TV: Apple (AAPL)

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) was a latecomer to TV streaming in the cloud.

Apple began ramping up spending for its own cloud only a few years ago, investing $15 billion in 2016 alone to build a global network of cloud data centers and, potentially, a place for itself in the new industry.

The money was spent mainly to serve existing paid Apple services, like the sale apps, iCloud storage and iTunes, which are now bigger profit drivers than the Macintosh or iPad. CEO Tim Cook said in his most recent earnings call that Apple Services brought in $7.17 billion in the December quarter alone, which he expects will double by 2020.

Apple’s streaming business is distinguished from that of Google because it consists of paid subscribers, and distinguished from Amazon and Netflix by being primarily fee-for-service rather than subscription revenue.

While iPhone sales are stagnating, Apple has found a new growth engine in services, and built a platform to challenge the other streaming players. Apple Music now has about 21% of the music streaming market, half that of rival Spotify, but Spotify is not profitable and struggling to justify a $8 billion valuation, which at One Infinite Loop is considered seat cushion money.

Apple’s push into TV streaming will be through a new app called, simply, TV, which aims to solve one of the most vexing problems for a streaming user — deciding what to watch next. The Apple TV streaming service itself has yet to launch, but rumors about it abound. Apple wants to get the same 30% revenue cut on TV streaming it gets on apps, producing a service that will cost $20-30 per month.

The most persistent rumors about Apple’s intent regarding streaming involve HBO Now, a Time Warner service that costs $15 per month, and which was Apple exclusive for a few months in 2015. Apple has the financial wherewithal to buy HBO as part of Time Warner’s merger with AT&T, or to buy a broadcasting company like CBS for cash. Apple TV hardware is used by an estimated 11.9% of TV streaming customers.

Thanks to its existing service businesses, global reach and over $200 billion in cash, Apple has the freedom to be patient and negotiate with rights holders before launching a TV streaming service. But it is far more concerned with maintaining its high margins than with driving traffic, which hurts it in competition with services whose prices start at virtually free, like Google’s YouTube and Amazon Prime.

It is hard for me to see how Apple can win in streaming when it’s unwilling to bend on margins to win market share, and willing to dither aimlessly with existing TV rights holders while rivals are creating their own shows and even new types of experiences.

But that’s just my opinion. I bought Apple shares before its 7:1 split in 2014, sold about half, but retain them in my retirement account. It’s going to be a nice retirement.

Stocks to Buy for the Future of TV: AT&T (T)

I got my first glimpse of the future several years ago, when rights to English Premier League games came up for bids.

The winners weren’t the traditional networks, public or private. They were Sky TV, a direct broadcast satellite company, and British Telecom, the state phone company.

This was years before AT&T said it would buy Time Warner for a reported $85.4 billion. It was even years before AT&T agreed to spend $48.5 billion for DirecTV, the direct broadcast satellite business.

The two deals will combine to transform AT&T from a phone company into a streaming player. It will be able to bundle wireless, satellite and internet subscriptions, and let its customers stream shows from DirecTV to their mobile devices without cost.

Its new streaming service, DirecTV Now, carried an introductory price of $35 per month for 60 channels and attracted over 200,000 customers during the fourth quarter which helped offset a loss of customers from its more traditional cable service, U-Verse. It competes in a cord-cutting niche alongside Sling TV, owned by DirecTV rival DISH Network Corp (NASDAQ:DISH), and Playstation Vue, owned by Sony Corp (ADR) (NYSE:SNE)

For the fourth quarter, AT&T reported net income of $2.44 billion, 39 cents per share, on revenue of $41.84 billion. While this didn’t clear the company’s 49-cent-per-share dividend payment during the quarter, for the year the company did earn $2.10 per share, beating the $1.93 annual dividend. It’s the dividend, a 4.7% yield to today’s stock buyer, that you’re buying when you buy AT&T stock. The shares themselves are worth little more than they were in 2007.

I switched from Comcast to AT&T for my own TV and internet service last year, combining it with my existing mobile phone subscription. I now pay the company about $400 per month for various services. That’s a lot of cash flow. I should probably buy the stock.

AT&T is the most traditional of the new streaming players. It earns a place in this gallery for its sheer size, with annual revenue of $164 billion, and its control of key internet infrastructure in the core of the network and at the edge.

AT&T has moved into streaming for defensive reasons. Internet advocates have criticized it for DirecTV Now, which gives its own customers free bits that others are charged for, ignoring the concept of network neutrality, but the Donald Trump Administration is giving it a free pass on that. When the acquisition of Time Warner is finalized — and that looks like a better bet with Trump in charge – AT&T will own a big hunk of the traditional cable universe, including HBO, CNN and Cartoon Network.

Time Warner agreed to be bought, in part, because it needs cash to compete for programming against deep-pocketed rivals like Netflix, Amazon, Google and possibly Apple. AT&T bought Time Warner because the vertical integration — owning the programming as well as the network so you write rights checks to yourself — should allow it to maintain that dividend.

Comcast made the marriage of network infrastructure and content work with NBC Universal, mainly by keeping its hands off its creative people. It is still unclear to me whether AT&T will be willing to do the same, or whether it will focus on milking a dying industry for profits, which has been its way of doing business since I began covering them over three decades ago.

That’s the only thing keeping me from buying the shares. That and the lack of capital gains.

Stocks to Buy for the Future of TV: Facebook (FB)

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is the newest and, based on revenue, the second-smallest of the new streaming players, behind only Netflix.

During the December quarter Facebook earned $1.41 per share on $8.81 billion in revenue. This makes it four times bigger than Netflix by revenue. With a market cap of about $390 billion, it is the sixth most valuable company in the country, less than five years after first going public.

Facebook got into streaming with Facebook Live, a sort of YouTube for streaming, which has already made news with House Democrats streaming a sit-in when Republicans turned off their cameras and with Donald Trump announcing a Supreme Court pick on the service.

Facebook Live is already getting Facebook into trouble with rights holders, like the TV network which saw sales of a recent pay-per-view fight in Australia impacted when one subscriber simply held his phone up to his TV and streamed it. There is even a name for this kind of thing — “stream ripping.” 

Facebook is reportedly working on an app for streaming, which would put it into more direct competition with Apple TV and Google’s YouTube. This would be a software solution that lets it piggyback on others’ hardware, like Chromecast, Amazon’s Fire Stick and Apple TV. In addition to supporting its streaming, the app would also support 10-minute TV shows with commercials inserted into them, like broadcast TV in the 1940s.

What makes Facebook powerful in streaming is the sheer number of people using the service — nearly 2 billion — and the amount of time they spend with it. The average global user spends 20 minutes per day on the service, and the average American spends twice that amount of time. 

Analysts are divided on analogies for Facebook’s strategy here. Is it Netflix? Is it YouTube?

In fact, neither analogy is correct. Facebook mainly wants to integrate video into its existing offering. It is backing away from paying publishers for streams, and may be backing away in the near term as people use its unmoderated do-it-yourself streaming to show themselves committing violent crimes and even committing suicide.

All this reminds me of something I wrote 20 years ago, about telephony. Telephony is simply an internet service. Today, video is the same, an internet service. The difference is that video is far more intimate than a phone call, easier to make money from and subject to discussion of rights, or right and wrong.

Integrating video, even streaming video, as just one part of a broader computer experience is the road not being taken by anyone but Facebook.

Stocks to Buy for the Future of TV: Alibaba (BABA)

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NASDAQ:BABA) got into streaming in 2015 by buying Youku Tudou, a Chinese version of YouTube, for $4 billion-plus.

Alibaba was late to this business, but is working hard to make up for lost time. It launched a paid streaming service called Tmall Box Office in September, 2015. It has a TV operating system called YunOS, which is getting its streaming services into homes throughout East and South Asia.

In 2016, Alibaba launched partnerships with a host of global producers, the most important being with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, which is aiming to bring Chinese stories to American audiences and vice versa. Alibaba also took a stake in China’s HeHe Pictures and signed a deal with Harry Potter producer David Heyman to produce a series of movies around Warriors, a children’s book series about warring cats. Already in 2017 Alibaba has signed to become a major sponsor of the Olympic Games, responsible for streaming events and back-end cloud computing.

Thanks to deals like this, Alibaba’s digital media revenues grew 270% year-over-year, in its most recent quarterly report. The segment produced $585 million in revenue.

Despite all this, Alibaba is still a relative minnow in the streaming TV stocks waters. Its streaming revenue is just one-quarter that of Netflix. What makes it powerful, and a threat to the giants, is its strength throughout Asia, not just in China; its willingness to buy its way into businesses like movie production; and its highly profitable growth trajectory, which gives it a cash hoard worth $15 billion, which it is far more aggressive about investing than Apple.

Because Alibaba enables commerce, rather than buying inventory as Amazon does, it brings over 25% of its revenue to the net income line, with operating cash flow that has grown four-fold in the last four years. It has enormous advantages in China, the world’s second-largest and one of its fastest-growing markets. This has given it a springboard into other markets like India, Indonesia and Thailand, where it is also growing a range of services.

It is just a matter of time before Alibaba becomes a major factor in the U.S. market, through its ownership of content and cloud operations if nothing else. Any innovation a U.S. company can come up with, moreover, can be jumped on by Alibaba in a flash, grown in China as a captive market, and then sprung on the world quickly.

It may be the most important story of the next four years, but it won’t be televised. It will definitely be streamed. I’m a buyer.

Dana Blankenhorn is a financial and technology journalist. He is the author of the sci-fi novella Into the Cloud, available at the Amazon Kindle store. Write him at danablankenhorn@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @danablankenhorn. As of this writing he owned shares in AAPL, AMZN, GOOGL, BABA and FB.