I don't think the supporters of A la carte TV have really given much thought to the consequences of the idea, or they have little understanding of how TV gets made. Right now is the best TV has ever been in terms of variety of choices, level of talent, quality of productions, and amount of experimentation. And the trend seem s to be that it's only getting better as we go forward. Bundled networks have allowed for a vast amount of new talent to get their starts. It has allowed for shows that are experimenting with formate or story lines to actually be made in the first place. Most of the FX shows like Louie, It's Always Sunny, Wilfred or Archer would never have gotten made in a A la Cate system. And those are just a few examples from one network out of hundreds.
Right now TV is being viewed as more cutting edge, more experimental, and having more freedom and variety than Hollywood ever was. How many times have we heard lately about how Hollywood movies are in trouble. That there is no risk taking and everything is a sequel to a franchise? Well that's because the film industry is an A la carte model and that's what you get.
The comparisons with iTunes is also not applicable. Well it did save consumes a bit of money (a full album is still $9.99) it mostly just cut the labels out as middleman (though they still are a bit). The artist themselves where mostly not effected too much since the main difference is that bands make most of their money touring. There is no "touring" for a TV crew. A TV crew gets their money upfront in the form of day/project rates or hourly. A band playing a few gigs to save up the money to rent studio time for a new project, is much different that needing to have a budget in place to hire the 5-20 man crew, fly them to location, pay for post production time ect. The editor need to be paid wether the show is a hit or not. The grips have rent, and need to be paid when shooting is complete, not after some internet sales. Studios are able to do this all on such a grand scale now because bundling allows them to spread the risk of any one project throughout the advertising revenue of the networks other shows or even other networks. The great thing is this even applies to small networks and production houses so that all levels of the industry can take more chances and flourish more than before.
How is removing all of that "better" just because there's an apple logo on it now?
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