Under and ala carte system, you might be one of those people who's channels choices are unchanged or possibly even cheaper than you presently pay.Ala carte puts so much of this tiresome debate to rest.
SBC, now AT&T, will offer something like a thousand channels. Surely, the technology of choice can circumvent the uproar to everyone's satisfaction.
You're not understanding though. Ala carte is going to be more expensive on many levels. It's going to be require databases with more, and more extensive fields per subscriber in the computer systems, which will mandate more storage space which is a re$ource that the consumer will pay for. It's going to take longer to process subscriptions and changes to subscriptions by human operators, which is a human re$ource that will have to be paid for by the consumer. It's going to be more labor and machien intensive on the accounting side of the business, which again is going to be paid for by the consumer.
That's just from the provider end. That doesn't even account for the myriad reasons why moving to ala carte might cause the originators to raise their rates to the providers, which will be passed on to you.
Anyone with an iota of business sense should be able to plainly see that the teir system is more efficient and cheaper to the consumer.