If you're saying that by paying another $54 per month per household, we could eliminate TV commercials entirely, I'd happily pay. However, perhaps it would be less than that anyway, since all those channels that no-one watches but account for some of that amount could just disappear, and no-one would miss them.
You appear to be among the minority. Often when this "dream" of the new model is thrown about, the high for out-of-pocket seems to be about $30/month. Most posts seem to imagine Apple will somehow work this so that we can spend about $10 or $15 per month based on the naive math of "Cost I pay now"/"number of channels I get now"*"number of channels I actually want". For example $100/200 = 50 cents times 10 (channels I want): My new bill should be $5/month. If all of our bills go from about $100 per month to about $5 per month, something has definitely got to give.
Someone is watching those channels "no one watches". Why? Because it takes eyeball counts to sell the commercials on those channels. No viewership at all = no eyeballs = no appeal to those who buy commercials. Thus, even on the very worst of those channels that we- as individuals- can be sure no one watches, someone is watching. In fact, it has to be enough someones to justify the commercial-selling efforts by the channel owners. If no one was really watching a channel, our tiny little contribution to those channels (that slice out of what we pay in our cable bill) would not be enough to keep the channel going. And we witness this when channels we hardly ever watch get killed off (if they made money just from a slice of our cable bill, they wouldn't get killed off).
If we consumers are going to make up for the loss of commercial revenue in this commercial-free "dream" of a new model, our monthly bill starts at $54/month per household. On top of that we need to buy our channels and Apple will want to make it's cut too. If we want to imagine that each channel would cost only- say- $5 each on average and we would buy 10 of them (our 10 favorite channels)- our bill is $104/month in this new model.
I seriously doubt the channels would average only $5 each in an al-a-carte model. I think they would be much higher. But even when we dream about $5 each, if we also dream about commercial-free, we can easily turn our $100 cable bill into $105 new model bill. Net result: 10 channels instead of 200 and probably a higher monthly broadband bill to boot.
Here's how to accomplish the same in the current model: Use your set-top boxes "Fav channel list" feature to build a channel list of just the channels you watch. This will effectively block out all of those channels "I never watch" so the net result from an experience standpoint is exactly the same as the dream. If you only watch 10 channels, build a fav list of those 10 channels and only those 10 will show in your guide. Meanwhile, in the now invisible background, 190 channels you never watch (and no longer clog up your on-screen guide) can keep making revenues from commercial buyers on those channels (commercials you'll never see) to subsidize some of the "good" programming that probably appears on the channels we do watch.
In this arrangement, your experience is likely pretty near to the al-a-carte dream but you don't lose the OPM subsidy, you could still get to those 190 other channels should one of them decide to show something you might want to actually watch and your television bill can stay at $100 instead of $105+... and your broadband bill can stay at about the same level it is now.
What about the commercials? Yes, they're still there (that's how we get other people to subsidize the cost of what we watch) but we can use skip features on our DVR to record the shows we want to watch and skip over the commercials during playback. DVR will also meet the on-demand desires of the dream.
Else, if we are going to pay the premium for commercial free and we want about 10 channels in our guide, even the conservative pricing of $5 per channel can yield more than what we pay now. And again, broadband will almost certainly go up in price if we are going to quit our cable subscriptions to download everything we watch via broadband (typically owned by the same companies).