Yes, some will pay, but on cable and satellite everyone paid even for channels they didn’t watch. And the outrageous salaries that NBA players are getting is because ESPN pays outrageous amounts to carry their games. Are you willing to pay $40-$50 a month for ESPN year round? That’s what they will have to charge and that still won’t make up the loss in revenue from the cable companies.
Yes, and even worse, the "channels" (networks) pay a carriage fee to the cable companies. So the cable companies get paid from both the content consumer and the content seller. The entire economics of cable tv is baffling to me. And Congress gave them Monopolies, basically, since they cannot compete outside of their designated market (an oligopoly). This made some sense back in the 1990s when there were 1000 different cable companies and they had to shell out big bucks for infrastructure builds. But they have had more than enough time to recoup those costs. And to complicate things even more, they have largely consolidated into a handful of conglomerates some of whom are massively in debt buying out various markets.
Congress needs to do with cable what they did with Ma Bell. Open it up. Make the cable and fiber a public utility so that anyone can offer services. There was a time, some will remember, when DSL was the "best way" to get internet and there were dozens of companies offering it because they were free to use the copper lines. Not so now with the cable and fiber.
None of this would change the price of what the streamers charge; which if you have fiber or cable and a couple of subscriptions ends up costing about as much as cable. But at least with streamers you pick and choose what to watch and can drop them whenever you want to stop paying.