This weekend the Wall Street Journal published a fascinating interview with Cablevision CEO James Dolan (a version is accessible here on Barron’s for non-WSJ subscribers) about how he sees the future of cable TV playing out.

While the post is full of interesting nuggets like Dolan playing in a rock band that opened for the Eagles last weekend, it was the exec’s very telling thoughts on what he thinks things look like going forward that made this a must-read for cable industry watchers.

As stated, it’s really the first time a CEO of a big cable company has come out and said that the long hold on his company’s cable TV assets is probably a bad idea, given the direction of over-the-top. The most telling paragraphs read as follows:

He added that the cable-TV industry is in a “bubble” with its emphasis on packages of channels that people are required to pay for, predicting it will mature “badly” as young people opt to watch online video rather than pay for traditional TV services.

To ensure Cablevision is prepared for the future, he said, he is investing heavily in the company’s network connectivity and overhauling operations to improve efficiencies.

If Cablevision does drop video service, “I don’t want to be saddled with an infrastructure that is as big as the one that I have now,” he said.

It makes perfect sense that Dolan would be preparing for an all-IP delivery (whether it’s through a closed network or over-the-top), but what is most interesting to me are his thoughts on bundles. The very fact that he believes that the bundle, or at least the bundle as it represented today, has a lousy future is, well, pretty damning.

Think about it: Cable TV is the bundle. It’s the entirety of the business; selling 200 channels for $100 dollars per month is really what cable TV is all about.

That he is losing his faith in the bundle says a whole lot in my opinion.

But despite all of Dolan’s misgivings about the future of the bundle and the cable TV delivery network, I’d say that such public musings are just that. Despite their fairly shocking nature given how unrelentingly on-message Big Cable has been around the value of its offerings, Dolan is just being frank about what any cable CEO worth his salt wrestles with given today’s reality, and he probably isn’t quite ready just yet to sell off the cable TV business, because there are so many innings left in the game.

Despite Dolan’s feelings about the bundle, I have a feeling the cable bundle isn’t going the way of the dodo just yet but instead is going to evolve. Cable bundles will become more specialized and more focused, not in a John McCain a la carte sort of way but instead more tailored around specific interests.

Will narrower — and lower priced bundles — combined with some cord-cutting be enough to get some big MSOs to sell off their assets? Maybe, but I think there will be power in owning delivery networks, particularly fully upgraded, always-amortizing ones that can be cost managed for a slowly shrinking user base.

And I’m sure that’s something Dolan — and others like Brian Roberts from Comcast — are thinking about quite a bit these days.