A la carte isn't going to happen. It makes no financial sense for anyone, including the consumer. Consumers just need to STFU because they're a bunch of retards that have no idea what they're talking about.
Why?
all of that money you're getting for carriage rates will go away, and you'll be asking those few Rutgers and Maryland fans (few relative to the state populations) to pay that cash for BTN every month.
That's the main reason it doesn't make sense for the networks.
People will buy ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPNU in most of their a la carte packages. Most folks will purchase access to FSN Kansas City or FSN Midwest because there is overlap with other sports teams they watch (i.e. Royals, Cardinals, Blues, etc.).
And, that's why it doesn't make sense for the consumer. You're not just going to get to pay for ESPN, you'll pay for a bundle of ESPN networks (if not every Disney network). You're ALREADY paying $7-9 a month to have ESPN networks in your home when it's bundled. You take away half or more of those subscribers and ESPN has to charge double. But, the biggest thing is, you're taking away all the advertising revenue of being a 24 hour network in more than 100 million homes. That's what nobody understands, 24 hour advertising is subsidizing the cost of cable. You make money for the networks just by having a channel go into your home whether you ever watch it or not because they can say to advertisers "your commercial can be seen in 100 million homes". That means that if a network's subscribers get cut to 10% (very realistic for even popular networks like AMC), they'll have to charge 10x as much to consumers just to make up carriage costs, but then they'll have to charge much more than that to make up for advertising losses because they're in 1/10 of the homes.
The ESPN networks would cost you $25-30 a month. FSN would cost you $10-15 a month. Plus, the cable company will charge some sort of infrastructure fee because it costs them money to send content into your home even if it's just one channel, that will probably be $10-15 a month. So, in order to watch any sports whatsoever, you're paying minimum $45 a month. That's pretty much already what basic cable costs and you don't get anything but sports (and you're still not getting NBCSN, BTN, NFLN, MLBN, etc.) and you have to switch over to the antenna to watch sports on over-the-air networks (unless you want to pay $10 a month for the local package).
I think when people try to act like a la carte is a great idea, they think channels will cost $2-3. That's not even in the ballpark of realistic.
