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Comment by CognitiveLens | Hacker News Reader

One of the strongest criticisms of current cable TV is that their selections are not fine-grained enough (e.g. I don't want to pay for HGTV and ten other useless channels just to watch the Discovery Channel). I don't think the one-size-fits-all approach works well with entertainment media.

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The solution to that seems (to me) to be to charge, e.g., $50/month flat, and pay the content owners based on usage. So if you don't watch HGTV, they don't get your money. This would allow access to all the programming without requiring that you pay for what you don't use.

The dirty little secret is that most of these channels are very cheap. The only expensive ones are ESPN and other sports programming. People who dont watch sports subsidize those that do.

We've been without cable TV for years. Any time I talk to people about cutting their cable TV the only objection is live sports.

I went off cable a year ago. The only thing I miss is ads for upcoming movies. Weird, right? Everything else I want I can get online, but I had come to depend on ads to tell me when a good movie was coming.

http://apple.com/trailers/

My girlfriend always seems to know the plot of every movie. For a while I was wondering when she was finding time to sneak off to the theater, and why she was doing it without me. Her secret was just that she watched just about every movie trailer at apple.com.

There are several sites to (text) preview movies, here are my favorites: http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/ (action) http://twitchfilm.com/ (thriller/horror/asian) http://io9.com/ (science fiction)

For watching the trailers I prefer Apple's site: http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/

It's interesting to see the differences between major sports. It's trivial to replace your cable TV with online viewing for baseball, but impossible for american football.

@derekprior is correct, ESPN runs like $2.85/month vs USA Network which is like $.60/month. (this is what comcast pays them to broadcast it to you).

I'd gladly pay multiples of that price for the ESPNs, if I could buy them a-la-carte.

It seems to be working quite well for new media companies on the internet.

But I can't argue very strongly against your point as it was a complaint of mine before I dumped cable.

Although if cable would give me access to all their content (tv, movies, sports, premium channels) for one affordable flat fee I would go for it.

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