carolinaradio said:
Add up the costs for the "a la carte" channels and the total will quickly equal that of a monthly cable/satellite bill. A la carte isn't as cheap as people think it would be. I probably watch 20-25 channels. I pay almost $60/mo for Dish Network. I can't see the ~20 channels I'd want to keep being that cheap in an a la carte system.
Two things need to happen to bring ala carte prices down and the biggest one is more competition. With just DISH, DirecTV and your local cable operator it isn't going to happen because they are making lots of money with the tiered structure.
20 years ago when C-band was big there were hundreds of providers so we not only had real ala carte but also self-defined tiers and the per-channel price was very reasonable. The pizza pan sat distributors arrived and gave away their equipment but then sold tiers only and those tiers were large and expensive and the cost has been going up ever since.
Now, I realize costs in general have escalated but my sat bill in the early 90's for about a dozen channels (not including premium services like HBO but including ESPN) was $60 per YEAR. Along came the pizza pan and my costs for the same services rose to $65 per MONTH. When I realized no one else in the house was watching sat I dumped it. If they make it affordable again I might subscribe again but I refuse to pay for services I don't watch.
While the per-channel ala carte cost is probably higher than if it were bundled most people would save total cost because they would subscribe only to watched services. Hundreds of services has no value if most of them are crap or infomercials.
Ala carte does work and has historical proof. Providers don't want it because it requires (in some cases) new equipment capable of isolating individual channels instead of tiers, addressable set top boxes, and the overhead of people canceling and subscribing to individual services instead of tiers.
In the old days this was all done through the Internet and was completely automated. Cost to the provider would be minimal. But they still don't want it because they make more money with the current system. So they lost me, and hundreds of thousands of others, as customers.
Smart. Real smart!
