If "traditional" cable TV is to survive they are going to have to offer a-la carte channel choice. I'd pay $5-10/month per channel for the handful of channels that carry interesting content. I refuse to pay $100/month for the 90% of channels that are pure crap.
I'm not trying to defend the cable company (hate them anyway), but I just want to point out one potential problem with the thinking: it's very likely that the 10% of channels that you are interested is in the 90% of those that others think are pure crap. The original idea to charge a lump-sum subscription fee instead of a-la carte is precisely to combat this trap. Otherwise, many niche programs will not be available in the beginning.
This was just an artifact of 'circuit-switched' CATV networks. With an IP-based network you can have 100,000 channels that cost nothing as long as they're not being watched. Literally anyone can start their own cable channel. (Starting to sound familiar yet?)
In such an environment, a la carte programming is the only thing that can possibly make sense. The tiered plans are gone for good, and cable companies will just have to deal with it and get over it.
Your thinking is natural but ultimately mistaken because of the counter-intuitive aspects of zero-marginal-cost economics. Here's a great thought experiment which illustrates the problem:
Actually, it is already illegal for cable companies to not provide a-la carte channels, the problem is they have a workaround which is that to get them, you have to order basic service, and then they charge ridiculous amounts for the individual channels.
