IT'S THE DAY after Donald Trump used a debate to tout the size of his, um, hands, and I'm sitting shoulder-to-shoulder around a 55″ high-def flatscreen with four of the guys working on a startup called Layer3 TV. I flip through the channels: Trump. Trump. More Trump. With a click, I add live Twitter and Facebook updates to the screen. When I reach peak Trump, I navigate over to movies, where offerings from Internet services like Netflix and Hulu appear alongside Layer3's on-demand flicks. If I prefer, I can check out what's on YouTube. "It's all on there," CEO Jeff Binder tells me, leaning back into the sofa with a grin.

Binder plans to reinvent the way you watch TV. For the past two years, he and his co-founders have quietly constructed a takeover tactic for the biggest screen in your home. They've raised close to $100 million from a fund run by private equity outfit TPG and talent agency CAA. But instead of trying to build the next Netflix (which everyone is doing), they're trying to build the next Comcast (which no one at all is doing).

I'm just going to say it: this is a crazy idea. The prevailing wisdom is that cable is dying. After all, cable companies lost more than a million subscribers last year, nearly four times as many as the year before. Viewers are able to find more of the programming they want on the web. Premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime have started selling subscriptions to watch their content online. Viewers can download apps for Netflix or Hulu. Google, Apple, Samsung, Roku and Amazon all offer web-based platforms for accessing a wide variety of content, and almost all of them allow viewers to watch all the new Netflix shows, which they can't get on cable. When entrepreneurs set out to disrupt the $185 billion dollar TV industry, they usually train their sights on something that can be delivered via the the Internet.

But not Layer3. Binder believes that maybe the future of TV doesn't have to be cutting the proverbial cord to cable. Maybe it's just making cable better: clearer pictures, better design, stellar customer service. Layer3 is betting it can grab at least a slice of TV's future not by abandoning cable for online, but by making cable better.