As for AMC and the like, I can't help but feel like their future is in allowing people to buy individual seasons of TV - like you can on DVD, but at broadcast.

As for AMC and the like, I can't help but feel like their future is in allowing people to buy individual seasons of TV - like you can on DVD, but at broadcast. I don't watch 90% of AMC's output, but I'm glued to Breaking Bad and Mad Men. AMC's a great example of why bundling "works" for content producers. They were a third or fourth tier network before Breaking Bad and Mad Men. But because they were on enough people's cable packages, they still had enough reach to bootstrap themselves to a point where they can charge the cable and satellite providers much more than they did before. Imagine instead of letting almost anyone in America watch Mad Men for "free" after reading about it or hearing about it from a friend, AMC had to count on people calling up their cable company and tacking on their channel for a dollar a month. No way does that model make sense, and under it, Mad Men and Breaking Bad wouldn't have been made. Obviously, there are alternative models that might work, but "paying for only the channels you watch" is a huge payoff to incumbents who already have shows you like.