One of the strangest aspects of the post Bell break-up era has been the continuing Bell fascination with content.

The reason for it: cable envy.

While phone service, and Internet service, take money only for bits, cable companies have long made money three ways. They make money on the bits they transmit, they make money from the content companies sending those bits, and they make money from local advertising.

Seen from that point of view, Ed Whitacre’s nonsense about charging Google rent for reaching “his” customers makes a little sense. It makes more sense when you look at history. ADSL was first launched a decade ago as a way for phone companies to offer cable service. BellSouth, Sprint, and MCI all bought MMDS bandwidth in the 1990s to deliver wireless cable service.

The triple play has nothing to do with consumers, in other words. It has to do with revenue streams.

Yet cable has not been a wildly-profitable business. Comcast was able to roll-up its rivals because most of them couldn’t make much money. Ironically, until Comcast bought it out, the Atlanta cable service which serves me was AT&T.

Why isn’t cable a good business? It’s highly capital-intensive. It requires huge marketing expense to protect the cable turf from cheaper-to-provide satellites. Regular maintenance on the lines and the service isn’t cheap. And the cable has to be replaced – we’re on our second generation of cable here in my neighborhood.

Despite its multiple revenue streams the most successful cable operator, Comcast, has kept its stock afloat the last four years mainly by buying it back. If you had bought Comcast stock five years ago and were now prepared to sell it back to the company at market, in fact, you would be taking a LOSS of over 20% on your investment!

How does Comcast get out of its financial dilemma? By owning content. But while Bellheads may take that to refer to deals like its purchase of OLN (and its failed run at Disney), the company is actually trying to be more like Google,writes John Battelle, making it easier for people to find the video content they want. It’s failing, he notes:

Note to Roberts: If your current interactive cable guide (which I suffer through daily) is any indication, you have *a lot* of work to do on user experience/user interface.

In other words, Comcast isn’t doing that hot, and it’s as confused as the rest of us.