Time-Warner CEO Richard Parsons has been quoted as saying a la carte cable pricing [...] is a bad idea for consumers. Yet, oddly, when Time-Warner Cable of NYC has a tiff with CableVision they can magically pull stations on/off the air.

Now, I know that that's comparing apples and oranges, they just yanked the feed for all subscribers at the head end. However, last year when TWC was in a tiff with the Yes Network over various fees, they allowed customers to voluntarily unsubscribe from the Yes network and we did, resulting in a $2 credit every month.

Truth be told, anyone with a digital cable box (anyone who can get cable modem service could get digital cable) has a box which is capable of ala carte channel subscriptions. Of the 100s of channels we receive, I'd guess we regularly watch about five, with the Tivos grabbing recordings off another ten or so. We don't watch any of the shopping channels (which we pay for), or the religious channels (which we pay for), or the sports channels (which we pay for). We end up subsidizing most of the channels we don't watch.

It's pretty stupid for the cable companies to stand in the way of ala carte pricing. I mean, on the one hand they get forced by the various content providers to carry multiple channels (witness Disney's bundling of the ABC Family Channel with ESPN, and all but requiring systems to carry ESPN if they wanted to carry ABC broadcast channels. Of course, the FCC requires cable companies to carry all broadcast channels in a geographic area.)

If Time Warner adopted ala carte pricing in the New York area just for their digital customers, they could document how many customers are willing to subscribe to specific channels and then avoid getting socked by the content providers to pay for 650,000 subscribers to the Fluff Network.

According to the message currently carried by TWC on the blacked-out (actually blued-out) MSG/Cablevision channels, TWC is willing to rebate $2 per month to customers while this tiff continues (I'd be just as happy to unsubscribe and keep the $24/year from this, and the other $24/year from the Yes network).

I'm perfectly willing to pay for content, and even accept that it may need to be bundled in like packages (eg: all sports channels, a set of movie channels, etc.), I just resent having to pay for the vast majority of channels which we never watch, will likely never watch, and are not in the target market for the commercials which theoretically pay for the channel. Time was when your cable bill either went to custom content channels like HBO or MTV which had no commercials to support them, or to subsidize the carriage of commercial channels. Now the content providers view the bundling agreements as a way of creating a revenue stream out of nothing. You can put a crap channel together and force it down the Cable TV systems throats because of the various bundling and must-carry rules.