I'd rather they keep the one price for everything plan. Once you start having tiered prices for different levels of service you are well on your way to the current cable TV situation we have now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think Netflix needs to add tiered pricing for streaming anyway. They need pay-per-view, or something similar, and they'll probably add it at some point. It's the only way they'll get new releases. Once they build that infrastructure, there's no reason not to sell their standard catalog as pay-per-view to people who don't want to pay the subscription fee, so long as they don't price it to cannibalize their subscriptions.
I would be uncomfortable paying extra for something on Netflix when I already pay a flat rate to get everything. Pay-per-view services would be a slippery slope that I wouldn't be pleased with. I hope they keep pay-per-view to some other company/service-by-another-name-that-isn't-advertised-on-Netflix.com.
