Why Pay For Channels You Don’t Watch? Ctd

A reader writes:

When Alyssa Rosenberg claims that the motion is toward paying for specific items, she seems years out of date. The visible motion is in the other direction. People are stopping buying individual recordings and are instead using services like Spotify, where they are paying for access to a large library of music at a fixed price. They can listen to Muppets today and Ben Folds tomorrow, and if they never want to hear George Clinton, they don't have to, but he's still available as part of the deal. In movies, people are buying far fewer individual recorded films, but (except for sizable blips caused by sudden pricing changes) they have been swarming to services like Netflix, which offer them one-price access to huge libraries.

As for it always have been the case for books, a large portion of the money spent on books is by people supporting their libraries, where they (through tax dollars) pay to have access to a large number of books, even though reading even 1 percent of a well-stocked library would be am achievement. It's a convenience not only in avoiding much of the cost of toll-keeping on each of these individual items, but because it avoids the barriers to experimenting. If I'm already paying for Netflix, I don't have to think twice about trying out some BBC sitcom or offbeat film, because it's there at no marginal cost to me.

Another writes:

That question is just soooo 1990s. Think outside of the cable industry box. People don't watch channels, they watch programs. Why should people pay for 24/7 crappy movies and other programs on HBO when all they want to watch is one hour a week of "Boardwalk Empire". Why should they pay for everything on AMC when all they watch is "Mad Men". The personal entertainment delivery system is going to shift to fee-per-program before you can say 2020. Think iTunes and what it did to the music industry. Why do you think the cable industry is lobbying to change the pricing structure on home internet connections? Facebook and Twitter may become the new program guides.