Right now I have Verizon 25/25 FiOS Internet only (phone is included but don't use & pkg w/o phone is actuall more expensive). If I wanted to add TV it would only be $30 more.
$30/month more for the cable service itself. Then another $10-$20/month per receiver you lease from them (or buy a standalone set-top box and pay $5/month for a CableCard). If you have 2-3 TVs in the house, or more, it adds up quickly.
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Even if true, that's $6.50 forced upon all of the subscribers of the tier that gets ESPN for a total revenue from that provider of $X. Conceptually in al-a-carte world, some of those people wouldn't want ESPN or the ESPN bundle for $X - (that loss). ESPN would only be interested in a new model that would yield $X + (more money). So, they would price worst-case al-a-carte accordingly. In other words, it would not be $6.50 plus a little markup (plus Apple's markup) but probably something more like $30-$50 for the ESPN bundle al-a-carte. That's a guess on my part but that could be a guess that would go either way, meaning I could be too conservative in that guess as easily as it being too high.
First of all, that $6.50 is what it costs the customer, not what ESPN themselves are getting. The cable companies are getting a pretty heft cut of that.
If they can charge those kinds of rates to the cable company, then their channel is in high demand. Unlike a niche channel, they don't need 10x their base cable rate because they're likely to get a lot more than 10% of the folks who drop cable for ala carte. I'd guess it'd be a lot closer to $10/month than $50/month. Plus, they get to keep
all of the commercial slots which they currently share with cable companies; more ads, more revenue. (Unlike produced content, live sports coverage has natural - and in some cases, artificial - breaks that will still be filled with ads, even on a subscription model.
And the ad thing is probably true for other providers, possibly in a 2-tier model where one has the standard number of ads (and again, those ads aren't shared with the carrier or reserved for local stations) and is priced lower accordingly, and one with a higher price but no ads.
There's also going to be a pricing difference between streaming content and the current iTunes Store model for TV where you buy the show and the copy is yours to keep, so using "TV season pricing" from the iTunes Store isn't necessarily a guideline for what a streaming-only subscription to a show might cost.