Ellis Dee pointed out that ESPN is a must-have because they have the NFL rights. This is reason enough that every cable company is going to carry ESPN. The fact that Disney owns ESPN has doesn’t matter – ESPN would still get picked-up. I thought your point was that extra Disney channels get picked up because of ESPN, but now I realize you’re saying it is the other way around. I don’t agree that that happens. ESPN gets picked-up because they paid a huge pile of cash for the NFL contract.
But yeah, I get the point that if you could mix-and-match and just pay for the channels you wanted, then that would be ideal for the consumer.