For many years the idea of à la carte TV has been the dream of many TV viewers. The ability to choose and subscribe to only the channels you want, which would allow you to create your own package, has been the dream of cord cutters and cable subscribers alike.
Recently Digitalsmiths, a TiVo-owned research company, released a study from 4th quarter 2015 that asked people what they would be willing to pay per channel and how much in total would they be willing to pay?
It was shown that most Americans are willing to pay about $3.63 per channel with an ideal monthly cost of about $40.56. At that price point most Americans thought they would get their money’s worth for what they are buying.
This ties in to recent research that shows that even people who are getting hundreds of channels only watch about 10 of them on average. So in our dream scenario, if you only want 10 channels you would only need to pay about $36.30 a month plus taxes.
Sadly, for now, this is only a dream because packages do not seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. A handful of companies own most of the channels, and these companies have no interest in selling them individually because many of them would not be able to stand on their own—without being sold in a bundle. It was recently shown that even big channels, such as CNN, would struggle to survive being sold as a standalone channel due to low viewership.
Yet the times are changing and people’s viewing habits are changing as we slowly get closer and closer to the dream of à la carte TV.
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