Why? Your price isn't going to go down, so why do those channels need to die? Someone watches them, just because it isn't you doesn't mean they should go away. Someone else could probably say the same thing about programming you like to watch.
The problem is, channels other than HBO and the other premiums are isolated from market forces by giant, bloated packages. Why does HBO have such amazing content? Because you can add/drop HBO alone without affecting any other channels (other than the 17 other HBOs that they throw in, but no one really cares about), so they have to compete for the consumer dollar. If other channels had to do that, some would die off, because no one really wants them, and others would provide far higher quality content.
The one thing I would say on the other side is if we had less channels there would be room for better resolution. It will be interesting to see how the business model plays if we went totally OnDemand would the increased bandwidth by freeing up all the linear channels be more than enough to go onDemand. Now of course the traditional networks might suffer from the lack of watercooler moment as would this forum if everything essentially became Netflix. They would not know how to sell advertising in that space.
That too. Full 19mbps MPEG-2 streams. The "watercooler", i.e. bullsh*tting in our cube now on Monday is all about HBO's Sunday night lineup. I don't watch GoT, but I do chime in when they get to Silicon Valley.
Otherwise, NO! OnDemand is horrible. They don't let you FF anything, they just delete stuff from the library whenever they feel like it. Linear TV is here to stay. Also, what about live events?
Live feeds? I certainly don't want to go back to watching TV like I did in the 70's. I've been time shifting my TV watching since the mid 80's. The only way this would work is if I could still time shift everything. There is nothing out there that I need to watch live. Especially sports. That is the last thing I want to watch Live since there are two to three times as many ads as there is playtime in many sports. That is much worse than TV shows. And there is nothing in the news I need to see in real time. Anything that is very important locally will come over my cell phone with the emergency alert system.
Most of the US would disagree, especially on sports. I enjoy the commercials for a bit, until they start repeating (the March Madness ones repeated so much that they drove me NUTS after about the 10th game, and by game 20 or 30, it was really bad). But really, I want to watch the sport, so I'm going to watch live. I'm a huge advocate of time shifting, I've never really watched live my entire life, but sports are sports... Basketball isn't that bad, as there is a lot of play time.
I actually agree with you in regards to watching news/sports live, which is why I noted both live feeds and recorded material. Just wanted to point out there no reason to use the channel model of OTA/cable to deliver any type of content live or recorded if we built out robust Internet delivery systems.
Regarding the commercials issues, this is where I see the current system finally failing. Right now advertisers are still willing to pay unbelievable amounts of money for adds that I really doubt many people watch. The current systems die when advertisers stop paying. I think there will still be a place for people to choice some adds versus no adds, something like Hulu. But many other people will want add free options. Honestly if I didn't have a DVR I wouldn't be able to stand watching OTA TV, when advertiser decide too many people are doing what most of us on these forums do something is going to have to change.
We don't have the bandwidth to do that. Imagine if everyone tried to stream stuff at the same time! Yes, any individual house that's getting 50-100mbps has plenty of bandwidth on its own (my roommates and I combined had HBO Go and 2 Netflix HD streams, plus some donwloads going all at the same time the other day), but if all of them stream at once, even if you shift TV QAMs over to streaming, the core of the network would still have a complete meltdown. "Broadcast", i.e. cable still has a technologically relevant role to play. Yes, it's online MPEG-2 encoding, so it's way less efficient than offline MPEG-4, but I probably suck down 100-150GB per week of content from cable without any impact on my internet connection, much of which I don't even watch, but I still have it locally to watch what I want when I want. And during the Olympics, that was at 1TB/week of video, during the beginning of March Madness that was upwards of 200-300GB over the course of a long weekend... Those numbers don't scale over streaming.
They still have live events, i.e. sports to tie commercials to. And a surprising number of people still watch TV live, even though they have DVRs. A lot of people still view the DVR as something that they record a show on if they're going to be out that night, not something to use full-time like TiVo users do.