You need to not look at the cost as cost-per-channel or cost-per-show, but in terms of value to you. If you are paying $15 or $50 or $200 per month for TV, do

You need to not look at the cost as cost-per-channel or cost-per-show, but in terms of value to you. If you are paying $15 or $50 or $200 per month for TV, do you feel you getting adequate value? Are you getting the shows you want to watch? An interesting thing about nearly all subscription services (cable, YouTube Red, Netflix, Sling, etc) is because they are fixed cost they have a built-in volume discount: the more you watch, the less you pay per hour. So if you pay $100/mo for all your services, and watch a total of 2 hours a month, that costs you $50/hr. If you watch 6 hours a day, it costs you about $0.55/hr. Let's say you're paying $185/mo for cable, and $15/mo for Netflix, but watch them evenly (3 hours a day each). Now cable is costing $2.03/hr and Netflix costs $0.16/hr. Are you getting value for the time? Are the shows you're watching on cable really worth paying 12 times more (plus being forced to watch commercials) than the ones you're watching on Netflix? Your original point was about paying for stuff you didn't watch, but when you think of it in terms of value per hour, if you are watching 6 hours of content you want to watch, you are paying $0.55/hr. It doesn't matter if you get 6 channels or 600, the cost per hour of content is the same to you. It's a different question you have to ask yourself if the service adds 200 channels (that you don't watch) and ups the cost so now it costs you $0.65/hr to watch the exact same content you were watching before: are you still getting adequate value for that price? If so, continue paying.