Network TV seems to be doing well on advertising dollars alone. I don’t know why Logo (to pick a niche channel at random) would do any worse.
I’m all for an a la carte chargeback model. I’m tired of paying $100 a month to watch 4 or 5 channels. There’s another channel I’d like to watch, but it’s only available at the $149/month package.
Some of the companies required the satellite guys to sell a particular channel only in a package.
I worded that poorly. I mean that they don’t make money off of me because I buy no cable packages whatsoever. If they offered a-la-carte, they would likely make money off of me in the short term. (Long term, I’d still opt for Internet-delivered media.)
Ah, then I see your point.
This is it exactly for me. I haven’t had cable or satellite or anything for over 15 years, so I have to get my fix when I’m at other people’s houses. I’ve finally decided to get some kind of service because the bundle wouldn’t cost anymore than my phone and internet are currently costing…but there are two channels I’d really like to get that aren’t included in the bundle I can afford, and at least twenty channels I will never, ever watch that are. So I probably won’t get anything at all.
Viewership for networks is a lot higher than for any cable channel.
You’re never going to get what you’re looking for. Either you’ll still be paying $100 a month for just those 4 or 5 channels or some of those channels won’t be available at all.
You’re looking at an HBO/Showtime model here. You’ll never pay pennies for a channel in an a la carte system.
It’s pretty tricky to talk demographics when we haven’t seen if another system would do any better or worse. Maybe viewership for some cable channels would rise significantly if the a la carte model was available.
I’m not looking to pay pennies a channel. I’m apparently willing to pay about $100 or so, because I presently do. But I’d much rather pay $100 for ten channels that I actually watch than $100 for a package of 100 channels, out of which I watch only 5.
I want to pay $10 per commercial channel, and $15 or maybe even $20 for commercial-free ones. HD and sports channels can be $25 because I don’t watch them 
Comcast can add $1 per channel surcharge. Under this model, there is a good chance I’ll be at or over my present $100 spending mark. But at least I’ll have bought something that I actually watch.
What Onomatopoeia said. I can go for long periods of time and not turn the tv on. If Ms Hook would go for it we wouldn’t have any tv service at all.
I’m failing to see the rationale here. In any case I think that most people aren’t so sire that they are absolutely never going to find something that will hold their attention on any of the other 95 channels.
No, they would drop like a rock and I can’t understand how anybody could imagine any other possible scenario.
With bundles, those niche channels get broadcast to tens of millions of homes that they otherwise never would. Market penetration = ratings. That’s why, for example, the wildly popular NFL gets better ratings on network television than they do on ESPN even though ESPN is in ~90% of homes across the country.
The idea that niche fans will support their Science Channel or G4 or whatever at $15 isn’t realistic. As an example, pretty much these same fans couldn’t even make Snakes On A Plane a hit movie. And before you say that SoaP was a bad movie – which it was – much of the programming on the Science Channel and G4 is bad programming you wouldn’t like, either. (This is a fundamental truth for all channels.)
It’s funny: with all this talk about how cable channels “should” be ad-supported… Once upon a time, the entire POINT of cable was that advertising wasn’t “needed”…
I think people are just trying to come up with ways to sustain the unsustainable. The paradigm of how entertainment programming is broadcast and its business models is rapidly changing. Online programming is where everything is headed. At 100 years, broadcast television has had a good, long run, but it’s simply over; the cable providers know this as do the networks themselves.
I predict that in five years, paying for a cable feed to your television will seem just as quaint as rabbit ears do today; some will still have it, but the majority will have moved on.
As 90 million people sat glued to their internet watching the Superbowl…
heh.
Here are some articles on the subject:
Why cable companies bundle their channels: The New Yorker
How we pay for cable may be about to change
Why Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos May Succeed Where Kevin Martin Failed (and why we might regret it)
TV A La Carte: One Man’s Dream
I think what a la carte proponents either forget or don’t realize is that quality and popularity aren’t synonymous. For example:
Programming that’s “worth watching” in the sense of being profitable enough to keep being made isn’t going to be Mad Men or Breaking Bad, it’s going to be Jersey Shore and Real Housewives of Atlanta. Is that really how you want to impact the television landscape in an effort to save 3% off your cable bill by dropping 90% of your channels? (Numbers pulled out of my ass. The actual numbers are debatable; see the linked articles above for more info.)
One more article:
Cable a la Carte: Choice vs. Cost?
Right or wrong, most of the industry argues that more options will give consumers higher bills. One likely result: Fewer second-tier channels
I haven’t seen those shows in question, but I’d bet that I’d take an interesting documentary over the above two, and I don’t see any cable channel subsidizing those. For all I know, Mad Men and Breaking Bad could be just as bad as Joe Schmoe’s Got Talent.
I have already made my choice to not subsidize TV “Worth watching” but not profitable enough to survive on its own by not getting cable. If I had a choice to pay for just the channels I consider worthwhile I would consider doing so.
Some people have made the argument that the sports channels are worth watching but would not survive on their own! I know that I wouldn’t want to subsidize them as I never would even think about watching them.
Who has made that argument?
Sports are the one thing that still draws big ratings. ESPN would survive better than any other channel in an a la carte system.
You know, maybe people that are too good for television aren’t really the people that matter when it comes to cable tv pricing schemes. If you haven’t paid for tv (cable/satellite/whatever) in 15 years, your input is pretty off-topic and irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It’s odd how many anti-tv people we have chiming in to a tv thread. Makes me wonder if the motivation isn’t just to boast about how above it all you are.
I don’t pay for TV for the same reason I pay for Internet, by a rational cost benefit analysis. I say to myself “self, if I had to put in $1 a day into my computer like a video game every day to use the Internet, would I”? And the answer is yes and so I do.
I would not literally put in $2 into my TV every day for the privilege of watching it. If it were only 50 cents a day I would, provided I had access to the very small sampling of channels I would consider watching. It’s as simple as that.
These people don’t exist except in your mind.
The people who don’t currently pay for cable TV are very much a group that needs to be considered when trying to figure out if a-la-carte would work (for some definition of “work”). They’re a potential market for channels which they are currently not paying for. If they would pay for them under a-la-carte, and if there are enough people like this, then niche channels could survive just fine.
Keep in mind that even under an a-la-carte system, cable companies could still offer bundle deals. Pay $X for an individual channel, or $Y for a bundle similar to ones that currently exist. Obviously many people are willing to pay $Y for such a bundle. Some current payers would switch to only paying for certain channels, and some current non-payers would become payers for certain channels.
It’s not exactly a question of higher bills. It’s a question of value. What do I get for my money? If I can spend $50 and get very little that I want (and a lot that I don’t want), or spend $80 and get a lot of what I want, I’ll be strongly inclined to choose the latter.
I think C Band satellite has always offered a la carte haven’t they? I never heard of any complaints.
No business can afford to accommodate every possible permutation of custom, especially those few who say that they would be willing to pay $80 for 5 channels they like but not $50 for 5 channels they like plus 95 more channels.
As for internet service replacing cable – cable companies themselves provide the bulk of high capacity internet service, so it looks like they’ve given this more thought than some people here think.