Why a la carte cable TV is a nutty idea

[SOURCE: CNN|Money, AUTHOR: Marc Gunther, Fortune]
[Commentary] It never occurred to me -- until now -- to call up the people at The Times to tell them that I would like to buy only certain sections of the newspaper and not others. And if The Times were to tell me the paper is an all-or-nothing deal, well, maybe I should ask my Congressman to require The New York Times Co. to sell its newspapers a la carte. This is, in effect, what some politicians in Washington -- led by Kevin Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and Sen. John McCain -- are pushing the cable TV industry to do. They would like to require cable operators to "unbundle" their packages of channels, so that consumers can save money by buying only the channels they want and no more. The thing is, 72 million people subscribe to cable. If they don't think they are getting good value, they can switch to satellite TV providers like DirecTV and Echostar or wait for the phone companies like Verizon or SBC Communications to offer video, as they have begun to do. They could also watch over-the-air television or -- please make sure you are sitting before reading on -- they could watch no television at all. If cable TV were a necessity, like phone service or electricity, there might be reason for regulators to decide how it should be sold. But it's not. We need food and oxygen. We don't need The Food Network and Oxygen. One thing unbundling would do: It would drive a bunch of cable channels out of business. They'd lose subscriber fees and ad revenues. Most people would not miss G4 or Sprout or the Golf Channel or the Independent Film Channel or BET but the reason pay television has become so pervasive -- about 85 percent of American homes subscribe to either cable or satellite -- is that it serves a variety of niche audiences.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/13/magazines/fortune/pluggedin_fortune/inde...