Where is the A La Carte model of OTT headed –  I think we know – In every Music CD like in every TV Bouquet there is stuff that you don’t necessarily want but pay-for but are obliged to because of the business model – If then people only want A La Carte then the business model has to undergo radical change and so does the business in total:  I am an Internet veteran and was in the heady world of digital delivery of music even before MP3 was invented…The industry was not looking for an alternative to an expensive CD as many people seem to think – File Sharing and Streaming is the the invention of technology  causing audio over the www to start to eat into the Major and Indies’ business models, it was an inevitable and unavoidable move to file transfer over IP which disrupted the model.   I was in the boom of start-ups that wanted to be the next businesses to deliver music to the consumer over the internet and ALL but a few companies (e-music.com, musicmaker.com, itunes) survived because the Music Industry finally beat them back (court cases, refusal to release content and more complex neighbouring rights (one singer could not be placed next to another on a compilation e.g. Celine Dion was not allowed to be placed next to Whitney Houston – you work out why) and a few had a model that could help them survive (Apple was BIG and won in the end as it is relatively secure and earns the money for the market – The piracy tsunami came later when bandwidth and devices appeared that could store gazzillions of songs and college/university campuses had server rooms and high speed machines.

Some people mistakenly think that A La Care in the music industry was to beat Piracy…ummmm!  However over the internet started with pure swapping and distribution to friends and family – file-sharing – But Content Piracy really started when tape-to-tape happened and you could copy cassettes and CDs and get something for free…The point about TV Bouquets is that they resemble CD Complilations or Albums i.e. every CD like in every TV Bouquet contains stuff that you don’t necessarily want but have to pay-for…it is put there by the producer because they want to sell and make profit the main titles and the fillers…

A La Carte in TV can only be a problem for the TV Content industry as the revenues will drop and the profits shrink as they did in the Music Industry.  Possibly nothing will change for the user’s pocket except the delivery mechanism:  Mark Cuban puts it better than I; “Expect your internet bills to go way way up as ISPs make it clear that all this video over the internet is going to require billions in upgrades. The irony is that while you may not like paying for cable channels you don’t watch. You will end up paying for cable channels on the internet that you don’t watch as well. In this case you will be paying via higher net bills for the extra bandwidth required to stream cable channels that your neighbors like to watch”