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.
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.