It’s a natural tendency of companies in similar markets to conglomerate. It used to be most of these channels were competitors, VH1 was started by Michael Nesmith to try to beat MTV for stealing his idea, but eventually somebody gets the upper hand (possibly through market action, maybe by getting bought by a company looking for horizontal expansion) and buys the competition. As long as the combined company won’t be a monopoly the FTC won’t stop it. The entertainment industry has always been like this, some of the best known companies in entertainment (Time-Warner, Chess-Checker-Argo, Elektra-Asylum-Nonsuch) are the product of this merger trend. Entertainment tends to be very high on overhead, but a lot of that overhead can be eliminated by combining companies. Instead of a dozen companies all having their own studio buildings to run various “news” style shows you can run all the ESPN/ ABC/ Disney “news” shows out of 1 or 2 building. Instead of a dozen companies having top shelf editing facilities all the Discovery channels can run out of 1 or 2 buildings.
Then of course there’s the leveraged selling to cable companies, it’s a lot easier to sell ESPN Classic with its hundreds of possible viewers packaged with ESPN than by itself.
C. J. Prahalad of the University of Michigan is an expert of this phenomenom, and he dubbed it, "The Rule of 3". I have studied this in several industries, including auto and telecommunications industries. I had not followed the entertainment/cable industry at all, so your data filled in a lot of holes.
Personally, I do not see the business model change until such time that the consumers stop paying the current prices. Unfortunately for me, it seems the entertainment generation is a multi-generation thing. That is, I doubt too many people will stop buying or call their cable operators for discounts.