Comcast Body. opened its latest earnings call with a surprise announcement: The Brian Roberts-led media giant was considering whether to spin off its cable TV channels into a separate “well-capitalized company” that would “position them to take advantage of the opportunities in the changing media landscape.”

Has Comcast tested the waters? Sure. Comcast President Mike Cavanagh he made clear that the company was just beginning to look into the idea and was far from making a formal decision.

But one thing became clear: Wall Street seemed to like it. Shares of Comcast rose when the market opened and closed up 4% on an otherwise down day for Wall Street. And the Comcast news seemed to send ripples throughout the industry, with shares of Warner Bros. Discovery growing as well, and Disney and Paramount growing as well. In fact, on a day when almost the entire market was down, the media and telecom segments rose.

A spinoff “would be a very welcome development,” MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett wrote on Oct. 31. “Investors have been yearning for exactly this, or at least something close to it, for years.”

Why the excitement? Comcast — which has greater exposure to the cable TV business and has subsequently lost more pay-TV subscribers than its rivals in the past year — could be a harbinger of the future, a world in which the many cable channels disparate, now unwelcome in the balance sheets of the companies that own them, could find a home in which to be the center of attention and have more freedom and flexibility to make strategic moves.

Perhaps most significantly, a spinoff could become a land of misfit networks, a place where unwanted cable channels could find a place to belong, or at least strength in numbers. Paramount Global, for example, has plenty of well-known cable brands like MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, but future owner Skydance appears to be focused on streaming and broadcasting.

Warner Bros. Discovery has a strong cable portfolio that includes TBS, TNT, CNN, Food Network, HGTV and Cartoon Network, but it had to take more than $9 billion depreciation charge connected to its channels as their value decreased.

And there remain independent cable-centric companies, trying to navigate the waters as best they can, that may find joining a larger firm benefits them. AMC Networks, which owns AMC, IFC and BBC America is one, A+E Networks (jointly owned by Disney and Hearst) is another, with A&E, History and Lifetime among its brands. Hallmark Channel, owned by the greeting card giant, is also a major independent player.

Only Disney—which had the possibility floated of following some sort of moves with his linear channels last year before retreating – appears out of the mix.

No one on Wall Street has been more outspoken about the need to consolidate in cable than Bank of America analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich, who has championed the idea for some time. “The biggest surprise is that Comcast beat WBD to the max, although we think a spinout could be a cable network consolidator (our view is that this will eventually happen for the industry),” she wrote in an analyst note dated Nov. 1.

Indeed, said Reif Ehrlich The Hollywood Reporter in an interview after WBD’s disastrous second-quarter earnings, a buildup of cable channels would provide ample opportunity.

“Someone will separate their linear assets and someone will splash them,” Reif Ehrlich said at the time. “We have all these — call them stranded cable networks — maybe part of bigger companies, but not an investment zone, not a growth zone. And so if you combine a lot of cable networks, I think you get rid of the overhead of the company. You can get rid of duplicate advertising functions, distribution, there are many costs by combining. A money-for-money package could be run.”

A consolidated cable company could also provide leverage in the increasingly bitter carriage disputes between pay TV providers.

There are complicators, of course. A big one for Comcast’s plan involves CNBC and MSNBC. While CNBC has historically been run as its own news organization, completely separate from NBC News, MSNBC has long relied on NBC reporting as a complement to its opinion broadcasts.

If the spin-off goes ahead, MSNBC may need to build its own news organization, work out some kind of deal to continue using NBC News’ resources, or abandon newsgathering altogether to focus on opinion. (Similarly, Wall Street Journal reported that Bravo could remain part of Comcast, citing the success of its programming on Peacock.)

Beyond that, the business involves a number of unknowns. How does one value such a declining asset? How much freedom will a spin-off have? And could such a deal extend the life of cable television? Or is his rapid decline inexorable?

Those are real questions, and Wall Street seems to think Comcast will find out the answers.

“The valuation is in the early stages and the company is unlikely to provide an update in the near term, but we anticipate that the company will be able to find ways to generate incremental value from a spin-out, such as cost synergies and/or a duration extended life if separate entity combines/partners with other cable networks,” JPMorgan analyst Sebastiano Petti wrote on Nov. 1. “Given the challenges in the PayTV ecosystem, particularly cable networks, the standalone appeal of these assets is unclear from an investor perspective.”