(04-09-2013 08:52 PM)solohawks Wrote: While it is almost always cheaper to buy in bulk there is a reason no everyone does; you end up wasting money If you don't use the excess. Same principle applies for a 100 channel cable package as it does a 2 liter coke; people don't want to pay for the excess.
I'm just pointing out that you aren't likely to be paying for any excess if there are six to ten channels that you regularly watch on a thirty to fifty channel tier. Its the people who only watch one or two channels on a tier, or who only have basic cable because they are not allowed to leapfrog to a specific premium tier without it, who are actually having extra willingness to pay
for those specific channels being tapped by the cable companies.
(04-09-2013 11:35 PM)sundodger Wrote: But if the paradigm were to shift to where ala carte became the normal subscripition mode, then the individual or even packaged grouping should become cheaper.
Cheaper than what? For the ones that remain subscription channels, it wouldn't be cheaper than their share of the price is your allocate the incremental cost of of the tier to each channel based on their carriage rate, it would be more expensive.
Quote: If the content owners priced them to high they would not get the number of subscriptions that they need.
But they are already priced to where the price of a bundle of 45 is inside a larger number of people's willingness to pay for a few "must have" channels, or five to ten favorites plus some that are watched less frequently for some specific show or specific event. If unbundled as a la carte, and losing the "free ride" carriage from those who are picking up the tier for some other bundle, they have to harvest their revenue from those who have a strong enough preference for their channel.
Quote: They may also be willing to bundle channels say for instance the Food Network and related, I may pay $5 for food network, but maybe $12 total for Food Network, Cooking, and Travel. And yes I would rather pay $75-80 for the 20-25 channels I watch than $135 for 200 I don't.
If everyone willing to pay $135 to be able to watch 20-25 channels were to keep watching those channels, there's no particular reason to expect that their cost would be much different to $135.
What does happen with a la carte pricing versus buffet pricing is that the customer is more selective, and ends up selecting fewer channels than entered into their decision whether or not to pay for the tier.
Say there are three packages ~ food, reality tv, and documentaries (eg Discovery, Nat Geo, Science, History), all bundled together. Person A loves package one, marginally likes package two, doesn't ever watch package three. Person B loves package two, marginally likes package three, doesn't watch package one. Person C loves package three, marginally likes package one, doesn't watch package two. The trick of tiered buffet pricing is that there may be a price that is a bit above the base value of 1 for A, 2 for B and 3 for C, because of the marginal extra value of 2 to A, 3 to B, and 1 to C. So rather than the three packages each getting what they would get from A, B, and C individually, they also share some of that marginal extra value.
Under a la carte pricing, the price that taps the willingness a A to pay for package one may well be more than twice the price that taps the willingness of both A and B to pay for package one, so the a la carte price is the one that gets A-type viewers to pay for 1, B-types to pay for 2, and C-types to pay for 3.
(And of course, any given channel is the same thing at a finer scale: different people watch different show on MTV or Food or History, so the shows driving interest will be different for different viewers.)
The business model of Netflix is to have one tier of ad-free service and buffet pricing for whatever it is among Netflix content that you are willing to pay the monthly price for. Although they had been expected to post a loss for 2012Q4, following a loss and two small profits since the collapse of their profitability at the beginning of 2012, they eked out a small profit, with an uptick in subscriptions from customers who got a new tablet and/or smartphone in the Christmas season.
The business model of two other direct subscription streaming sites announced to have hit profitability ~ Hulu and Crunchyroll ~ is to have a free, ad-supported tier of content and services and a premium tier of content and services that you pay for ~ also under buffet pricing.
The prices for those three more or less commercially viable direct streaming video services are quite similar to the prices of a la carte offerings already on cable, with a lot of them in the $5-$10 range, so there's no particular reason to expect a shift to all a la carte, either on cable or with cable cutting, to see a channel cost outside of the $5-$10 range for ordinary content. Obviously an al a carte offering of ESPN or HBO would have to be higher due to the higher cost of their content, though there the uncertainty is whether the market would be able to support a price point that would be adequate to cover their rights/productions costs.