I often wish we could choose programming a la carte. I have basic DirecTV, and I customize the guide to block out anything I know I will never watch (hi, MSNDNC & CNN). I end up with maybe thirty channels. I’d lose even some of those if I could pay only for those I really want.
The icing on the cake would be the quick demise of lots of liberal channels (hi again, PMSDNC) and lots of absolute crap (too many to mention). Like most liberal enterprises, the liberal channels would probably not be able to compete on their own merits...they need subsidies from unwilling donors.
They’ve known for years that if we were allowed to select the channels we wanted to pay for, it would become obvious that they could not justify the bandwidth to carry many of the lesser-watched channels. That would be fine by me, let the market decide what is worthwhile and what isn’t - not some cable executive. The problem is, if “we” only choose to watch 10 or 20 or 30 channels of our choice, we wouldn’t want to pay as much as the bundles of 50 or 100 or 200 they shove across the satellite or cable today. They don’t want a bunch of $20/month customers, they want a bunch of $80/month customers.
I do the same on Directv. Sure makes flipping through the channels quicker when you don’t have so many bad channels to go through doesn’t it?