I'm going to be a bit of a devils advocate in this thread, and I'll probably get downvoted for it.

Everyone is clamoring for a la carte programming right now, but I don't think a lot of people realize that while cable does seem expensive, a lot of the niche programming is being subsidized for you. Once channels start to unbundle and sell it to you on their own, you're going to end up paying more for it individually than you would as part of a package deal. Sure, you'll only be paying for what you want, but the reality is that you'll probably end up paying just as much for content unbundled as you would under the traditional tiered systems. Your broadband internet? Also subsidized as part of a bundled package with pay television.

A lot of the smaller niche channels will likely die off. Many of you say that's good and its the market talking. But there are still a lot of people who like that content who won't be able to get it any more. Additionally, if you think that channels offering themselves a la carte means that advertising is going to go away because you're going to be paying a higher access fee, guess again. The dual revenue system that these channels benefit from now works because they are guaranteed a certain level of distribution. If Discovery for example, is only getting $0.25 per sub per month and is guaranteed distribution across 75M subscribers, they're raking in almost $19M per month in sub fees. Now, if they go a la carte, and only 3M people want to subscribe to the service, they need to make up that money somewhere, right? So you're looking at probably $6 a month, just for that one channel, whereby you were paying only 25 cents before. Cobble together all of the channels you want, and you're basically looking at prices as much or more than your traditional bundled cable package. And they'll still be showing ads too. Netflix and Amazon are unique snowflakes in the digital streaming world that they dont CURRENTLY serve ads. But who knows if they will continue down that path in the future, or if they'll need to in order to generate the revenues that investors are looking for.