What The Marijuana Industry Can Learn From The Cable Industry

istory repeats itself and our job is to learn from it in advance. It turns out, the saga of the cable industry holds a great deal of insight for the reflective and well-studied cannabis entrepreneur.

On their surfaces, the cable industry and the cannabis industry couldn’t be more different. However, as we will discuss today, they have both had similar developments and both face potentially tough regulatory challenges.

Cannabis is expected to grow at an astronomical rate as more states legalize it and billions of dollars of investments flood into the industry. The prosperity of legalization is countered by the crippling effects of federal laws and state regulations. Places like Michigan and some Canadian provinces are seeing lawmakers put up barriers even after voters approved recreational cannabis. Cannabis companies can also fall prey to local zoning regulations as many states allow for local municipalities to decide if and how cannabis companies can operate within city limits.


Today’s cable industry may not resemble the fledgling legal cannabis industry, but looking back at its history reveals the challenges it faced and the challenges that the cannabis industry itself may face.

The development of the cable industry

The cable industry has been around for over 70 years, and in that time has had game-changing innovations, yo-yoing regulatory frameworks, and continual threats to its business model from internal and external sources. Nevertheless, the cable industry has managed to persist and adapt through it all (though, there has been a consistent eulogization of the industry for the past decade).