How is this "a la carte"? I don't care about channels; I'd be willing to pay a couple bucks to watch some specific movie or TV show, but "you have to sign up for a monthly subscription to some corporation's arbitrary bundle of media offerings in order to get access to the one or two things you actually want to see" is pretty much the opposite of "a la carte TV".

It's a la carte because for decades you had to buy bundles of schlock from your cable company to get the one thing you wanted (typically ESPN).

Presumably you want finer-grained a la carte, like individual shows and movies. You can get that today via iTunes but it is insanely expensive, and it doesn't really make economic sense because not enough consumers watch little enough TV for that to make sense, therefore the price remains high and companies offering it are not doing well.

Right now the market forces are pushing everyone to try to be either Netflix (streaming service become producer) or HBO (producer becoming streaming service). As the technologies commoditize this trend will continue, and consumers will just have to deal with the abominable UX that this balkanization of services creates. It'd be nice if someone could wrap a nice UX around this, whether it be a la carte or whatever, but I don't see that market forces would allow that, and least not until the balkanization gets a lot worse and rights holders get an incentive to play nice with aggregators.

When you say "market forces", it is important to understand we are operating within the confines of the completely arbitrary market dictated by copyright law. The natural market for "intellectual goods" like music, movies, and TV is very weak (which is why copyright was created in the first place).

Cable companies and centralized distributors are the natural conclusion of our copyright mechanisms. Online video has already been coalescing on Netflix and Amazon as the next-gen cable cos instead of Comcast and AT&T.

If we don't want to be stuck with the same thing over and over again, we need to change the way that we've constructed the artificial market for intellectual goods, so that subscription bundles a la cable is no longer the only feasible economic model.

I like this approach, not shying away from reexamining the fundamental problem. What do you define as a "weak market"?

Seeing as that's the problem, affording agents in the space more or better control to try and strengthen the market could be an approach - so I want to understand where/what the current weaknesses are.

Yes, I understand that. I spent a decade of my life building a startup in this space. If you have an angle on how to change copyright law then I'm all ears.

If that's what your looking for, it seems like you can get it from dozens of places like iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Video, etc.

The problem tends to be the pricing. The per-episode and seasonal purchase rates often seem higher than going and buying a DVD, probably due to the store taking a cut. The streaming services, or even cable TV, are much cheaper if you make a lot of use of them.

The hope always seems to be to operate like a gym, where there are people paying but almost never showing up.

If they were separate arguments, then album sales wouldn't have dropped after iTunes started selling $0.99 a song. CD Singles have been around forever but everyone paid the extra couple dollars to get the rest of the album even though in many cases very little effort was made producing the rest of the album.

To clarify, I don't mean that the delivery options won't have an impact on price. People often seem to frame the arguments around videos services as them not providing the unit of content they want (like marssaxman above), when more often than not they do. The real complaint is usually just what your saying, they don't offer it at the desired price, despite a ton of unbundling from the old model. That's a fair critique to make, although I'm hopeful the market is able to sort it out

And the store content also come 6 months to a year or more after the original air time.

Not sure where you’re getting that idea - pretty much every TV show available on iTunes is available the day it airs or the day after.

That may be true for traditional TV. Game of Thrones is currently airing season 7. Unless you subscribe to HBO you can only get season 6. Season 5 of House of Cards was released in May and still only available through Netflix.

Sadly, cable bundling is what allowed small channels like AMC and TNT to develop programming and reach an audience that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

That's all going to consolidate into the hands of a couple of major producers (Disney, HBO, Amazon, Netflix, maybe Hulu) and that's about it.

I mean, not to belabaor the point, but when you also include:

NBC/Universal/Comcast Viacom Fox Sony Time Warner BBC

Plus some other deep pockets who are slowly getting in the game (Verizon, AT&T, Apple)

I think there'll be enough competition even among the oligopolies to make it palatable for consumers.

A la carte TV pricing was always a stupid idea. What people really wanted was cheaper pricing, which is of course not going to happen.

Or pay for a channel for a month or two, then drop it.

Pretty much what I would do. Netflix has such a large catalog, that I don't bother cancelling during periods when I'm not even using the service. If the content I'm interested in is spread through various services, I'll simply sign up, watch what I wanted to watch, then cancel. One month's subscription is enough for me to catch up on a season's worth of some series I like.

This however creates the incentive for providers to start enforcing long term contracts for the regular price, or a much higher price for a monthly plan, in which case DVDs will be relevant again for me.

That's what I do with HBO right now. Only thing I'm interested in is Silicon Valley and Game of Thrones. Once GoT is done for the season, my account will get closed just like I did last year.

It's not quite a la carte. We've gone from 1 provider, with bundles to N providers. I don't mind paying for each content provider. What I personally mind is the content being spread across a bunch of different sites.

I don't want to have an HBO account, and a Disney account, and a Hulu account, and a Netflix account, and an Amazon account, etc etc. I wish they'd play nicely and let one provider bill me, and take care of restricting my access to their HBO portion of their library unless I pay an addition $X/month.