As Viacom chief Sumner Redstone, 92, fades from public view and Viacom’s ratings and earnings continue to be lackluster, speculation about the company’s fate rages on.

Redstone’s daughter, Shari Redstone, 61, is expected to be named the company’s successor, displacing current CEO, Phillippe Dauman. But unlike rival media megalith News Corp., those decisions have yet to be formally put in place. Meanwhile, Dauman’s hand remains on the company’s tiller.

Viacom executives insist that everything is fine at the company, which includes 23 major and minor cable networks and Paramount Pictures, but the numbers would indicate that this isn’t entirely true.

In the past TV season, ratings have declined by double-digits across the company’s most popular networks, including Comedy Central, BET, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike and TV Land. At MTV alone, ratings are down 21.7% from last year and 25% in the 18-to-34 demographic the network targets, reports Bloomberg Business News. Across all of cable, ratings among key advertising demographic adults 18-49 are down 7%; at Viacom, that number is 19%.

Even with all of that bad news, Viacom still manages to be profitable, last year reporting $2.4 billion in net income on $13.8 billion of revenue, but that was last year. In this year alone, Viacom has taken a $785 million write-down and laid off several hundred employees.

Making this situation worse is the current trend toward unbundling to move toward over-the-top services and skinny bundles. Forcing customers to take networks they never watched helped fund the cable industry over the past 30 or so years, but the Internet has deeply disrupted that model. Just wanting your MTV may no longer be enough: you also have to be willing to pay for it, and many aren’t.

In addition, some of Viacom’s biggest stars — Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver — all have jumped ship. Stewart is moving on to other things, while Colbert is headed to CBS and Oliver is making headlines at HBO.

“The threat to the core of Viacom is profound,” Patrick Keane, a longtime media executive and current president of Sharethrough, told Bloomberg Business. “The changes are hitting Viacom harder than virtually any traditional media company on the planet.”

Read more: Bloomberg Business News, Vanity Fair

Brief Take: Viacom could be the canary in the coal mine when it comes to the fate of the cable TV industry, which is experiencing deep disruption as the age of Internet video and OTT takes hold.

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