Why do people continually think something is a "great business model" because it results in things being cheaper for the consumer? Explain to me why the content providers should change their model to something that results in you sending them less money every month? Show me the model where you send more money to your cable company or to the network providers and then you might have a "great business model". Show me how they can raise the prices they charge to run adds, then you've got a "great business model." I'm not saying this can't be done, but suggesting that you should be able to buy just five channels of content and cut your monthly cable bill in half just doesn't make sense for the company receiving those checks.
I see you've been voted down, and I can see why, but you have a nugget of truth in there. A great business model is NOT one which minimizes money leaving the customer's wallet bound for the company's bank account.
BUT, you are missing two things:
1. There is a larger market than "your cable company" (which is a monopoly and can charge pretty much whatever it pleases). People with a fixed budget have some amount allocated to "discretionary" entertainment expenses. The cable bill, on the medium timescale, is one of those discretionary expenses, but so are going out to movies, reading books, playing video games, etc. The cable company and indeed TV industry writ large DO have competition for your dollars, and providing visibly substandard value is a major deterrent to consumers spending more on your particular type of entertainment.
2. It isn't "the content providers" who are raking in the big dough here. The major money makers in TV are the cable companies, and then the networks (which are sometimes content providers, but often just aggregators). You can see the relative profitabilities just by looking at the Comcast-NBC merger (where the "NBC" side of the fence includes a lot more than just the network and content funding arms). The
content providers would be
greatly enriched by a content distribution model which reduces the relative takes of the distribution (cable company) and aggregation (network) layers which currently hold near-monopolistic powers (how many networks can you shop your show around to? if the network which bought your show decides to cancel it on the fourth episode, what can you do about it?).
In this case, "great for consumers" and "great for content producers" both align in favor of a la carte series distribution. That having been said, the layers that reduces (the cable company becomes a dumb pipe instead of a choice curator; the network execs become industry-specific banks and may offer a voluntary curation function instead of having absolute power) are the ones with the big bucks and the power, and any shift of content producers over to a new model will be dealt with in a highly punitive manner by the contract those entrenched interests hold for distributing content to the "other 90%" of the not-tech-savvy populace.
