> An actual 'A la carte' situation is that of the consumer being able to actually handpick the shows they want and only pay for those. This will never happen due to the industry being absolutely hostile to the idea...
We've been able to do this with a substantial number of shows for years, though, by buying individual episodes or "season passes" on Amazon and iTunes. Maybe people just don't know, maybe people think the prices are too high, but more than likely the market has just largely moved on from this model for much the same reason that it moved on from CDs: the rise of streaming. (But put a pin in that for a second...)
> ...second best from a consumer standpoint is a single huge distributor like Netflix where you would pay larger fee but have access to practically everything you want...
This is what we all want price-wise, but would we really, truly want to turn Netflix into the equivalent of the iOS App Store for essentially all legal streaming movies and television?
Everyone blames the proliferation of streaming services on rapacious greed, and, I mean, sure, the profit motive is mighty. But it's also a matter of keeping control. Broadcast networks and cable companies are middlemen who not only take a cut of the profit but who also act as gatekeepers; it's a little mad to think that producers would want to free themselves from that system only to rebuild it with a single all-powerful company in the command seat.
Sure, not all the streaming services will survive, especially at the prices Netflix is currently charging. But I'm not convinced that the world is really going to rise up and rebel against having to pay $50 or $60 a month total to a half-dozen providers for commercial-free, on-demand access to hundreds of thousand of shows versus paying $100+ a month to a single provider.