Let's not forget how many millions it takes to write, develop, and throw away pilots until you get a series that works with the viewers.
AMC would never have had the money to do this and Mad Men without the subsidy of cable bundles funding them during the early years. If AMC was an ala-carte channel in 2005, none of this would have happened.
You're absolutely right. The majority* of people on HN seem to have no clue how TV and Film is actually paid for, how the content ecosystem itself works. They just see the end product.
To flip the tables a bit, here is the same logic being applied to tech, instead of TV/Film:
First, lets get rid of these incubators, angels, VCs, and IPOs pumping money into the system up front. Surely, the $30 million spent to start Foobr.com could easily be paid by the users, right?
Second, instead...sell time on Foobr.com at $2.99/day a la carte. Multiple by the 1 million users that the $30 million pre-funded Foobr.com has today, and Boom! Foobr.com can clearly exist (in the same form, too!) if we got rid of incubators, VCs, IPOs, aquihires, and all the rest.
Third, gloat on HN, in blogs, podcasts, and on Twitter. It's math, dude! Bask in my brilliant economic analysis of the startup ecosystem. You people working at Ycombinator and VCs, and buying stock at IPOs? Chumps, all of you! You're just subsidizing my usage. I get for free what you pay billions for. Idiots.
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This analogy (if you don't know TV and Film is funded) is much stronger than you'd think. It's amazing how similar the two are in terms of funding.
And hopefully everyone can agree that removing literally all of the up front funding channels for tech startups, and instead moving to a la carte pricing on the final product, is not a workable plan. The same is true of TV and Film. You cannot simply move it to a la carte pricing and expect the exact same things to be available, and at the same quality level.
There are very strong reasons why the Film/TV ecosystem is the way it is that are not immediately obvious to people outside of it. If you want to disrupt it, you'll first need to understand it.
AMC would never have had the money to do this and Mad Men without the subsidy of cable bundles funding them during the early years. If AMC was an ala-carte channel in 2005, none of this would have happened.