By MAE ANDERSON

By MAE ANDERSON

AP Technology Writer

NEW YORK

Cord cutters rejoiced last week after HBO and CBS announced plans to sell stand-alone streaming services, a move that cable and satellite television providers have resisted for years. Customers tired of paying big fees for hundreds of channels they never watch just to have access to a few favorite shows might be expected to start cancelling cable service in droves. Get Netflix, throw in HBO, add a network here and there — why would anyone sign up now for cable?

Well, don’t sound the death knell for cable companies yet.

Some would-be customers may balk when they see just how much paying a la carte actually costs. Stations that offer services a la carte will have to pay for marketing that the cable and satellite companies usually cover. Fewer eyeballs on live TV could mean less advertising revenue, since online ads are generally cheaper, and that will boost the network’s cost of running the channel. And smooth streaming costs money: to avoid so-called “throttling” during peak evening viewing times, Netflix buckled to broadband distributors like Comcast and Verizon and paid up so that its streaming service would run at a higher bandwidth and work more smoothly. Those added costs might be passed on to customers.

And for all those cable haters out there, sorry: Cutting the cord won’t mean cutting out your cable provider. They often own some of your favorite channels (Comcast owns NBC Universal, parent of Bravo and USA) and in most areas they are the gatekeepers to the Internet. Offering popular channels like HBO over streaming could actually help cable companies sell more expensive broadband services to customers.

“The cable business is evolving from mainly selling you a pay TV package to mainly selling you a broadband Internet service,” says FBR Research analyst Barton Crockett. “Content companies and cable companies are evolving from being very worried about making their content available through Internet services to [being] very excited about that. It’s a way to sell their Internet and get people to pay for faster speeds.”