[pbreit]

This, on your last paragraph. Premium a la carte channels (bundles, actually...you usually get 5 or so HBO channels) depend on being differentiated from the rest, one important variable being differentiated pricing, distribution and exclusivity.

[glesica]

Seems like there is a good chance that the Internet will end up encouraging this. The same thing happened in magazine publishing. General interest magazines fell off a cliff, but special-interest magazines generally survived.

The same could be done with television. Instead of buying a subscription to 200 channels, you could just buy a set of comedy channels, or channels related to cooking and entertaining. Of course the whole idea of a "channel" is really a legacy concept, but the concept would be the same.