In article ,
 "M.J. Sammon"  wrote:

> I don't think 100% ala carte would be a technological problem for the cable 
> companies.
> My provider, Cablevision, can already do that with VOD movies.  They have 
> 100's
> of movies available to several hundred thousand customers.  There's plenty of
> bandwidth if you compress a SD signal to the set top box.
   Depends on your definition of ala carte, I would guess. If you get to 
choose which specific shows you want, yeah I could see that. But if I 
could decide that I wanted specific channels (haven't even looked at 
Sleuth or any of the shopping channels in years) then it might be easier.

> 
> The real problem with ala carte is how do you bill for it?  The cable company
> no longer has a steady revenue stream.

    Like now. Only instead of tiers you would have specific channels. 
You could do it with a base tier of the biggies (CNN, USA, TBS, TNT, etc 
that are on the basic tier now) at a certain price and keep the premium 
channels (HBO, etc.,) premium. But you could fill in your own tiers with 
(say) 8 channels of your choosing for an additional price, another 8 for 
a little more money, etc.

-- 
  I want to find a voracious, small-minded predator 
and name it after the IRS.
Robert Bakker, paleontologist
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