Given how few other channels I regularly watch on Dish, in essence, I already am.
The amusing part of the linked article is this:
Michael Nathanson, of MoffettNathanson Research crunched the numbers to see how much it would really cost to create an a la carte world where consumers only had to pay for the stations they wanted to watch. Looking at “reach” (defined here as the percentage of U.S. viewers watching an individual channel over a finite period of time) and subscriber fees (the price per subscriber a company like Comcastpays to a network like ESPN to carry the network) Nathanson found that users would have to pay $36.30 per month for ESPN.
Of course ESPN is an outlier. With a $6.10 subscriber fee (paid by cable companies) ESPN is far and away the most expensive network.
But even less expensive networks like TNT, Disney Channel and USA would be pricey on an a la carte basis.TNT would cost $8.95 per month, Disney Channel would cost $8.25 and USA would cost $5.45 per month.
Those number are, of course, ridiculously high and they’re even worse when you look at what people believe they should be able to pay for something like ESPN a la carte. Beta Research found that the perceived value of ESPN to viewers is $1.45 per month — a $34.85 difference between what they would actually be asked to pay.
So your average rube undervalues what ESPN currently costs in a bundle by a factor of four. Yeah, I’d say somebody’s in for a bad case of sticker shock if unbundling cable ever becomes a reality.