>Ah, so you want to pay only when you actually watch a channel? What would be a fair price then? Let's say you watch channel 200 (I have no idea what channel 200 is) for 30 minutes and then channel 500 for 30 on one day. What should you be charged?

Whatever I'm willing to pay :). At least, that's the market logic, isn't it?

The trouble is, this would lead to a different rating system, and a completely different television, and all the network gurus would face a possibility of actually looking at their building from the outside. Imagine having a long tail market in TV, just like Netflix works. With 500 channels, you can have that. If there's room for 80 sports channels and 30 music channels, there may be room for many other things that one may want to watch from time to time. Bundling...

>Actually, I agree that we should be able to pick and choose specific channels and not buy 'packages' of channels. That bugs me to no end.

...is bad marketing. Even this much that I'm paying is a bundle - I had to filter out more than half of the channels (those that are 100% ads, that is). TV is somewhat different from leeks, IMO, and selling it in a bundle doesn't do it justice.