You do need a central heartbeat; the cable company is the party that bills you for service, so they're the ones determining if you have access to the content. T

You do need a central heartbeat; the cable company is the party that bills you for service, so they're the ones determining if you have access to the content. The content owners (i.e. TBS) send start/stop data to the cable company via their app, there's a timeout if the heartbeat is lost, plus the DRM keys expire pretty frequently (every few minutes I think, though it depends on what streaming service the content is hosted on) so if they're not renewed you can't keep playing the video. Add a little logic to this flow and you can see how it works. Not every app implements this properly, but it's all part of the decade-old spec. If this sounds like a lot of work, you're right -- the vast majority of content owners outsource all this work to Adobe's hosted TVE platform that maintains integrations with multiple cable companies. Edit: also, cable companies definitely collect and resell viewing data for advertising purposes. Shouldn't surprise anyone, but they've had this capability for at least 20 years (STB channel change used to be sent on out-of-band RF back then but it's all IP now). In fact, with nothing more than an IP address, you can usually target quite a few attributes at the household level.