How do they get away with selling commercials when they charge that much?
I recently tried sling.tv and it was terrible. Why would I want to pay to spend 1/3 of the time watching ads? (not to mention how _bad_ almost all of the programming is)
I would pay a _lot_ for a content subscription that had a history channel that actually had history programming... a science channel that actually had science programming ... all without ads or gimmicks.
Mythbusters guys are great but half the content is either commercials or cliffhangers trying to get you to stay past the commercials.
There is a vast untapped market of educated people who want to purchase content that's targeted beyond the means of a clever 8th grader. Instead we get news for gossip freaks, reality tv shows, and what little advanced interesting content there is is targeted way too young.
Science and history programming is sadly low brow. Netflix had a 12 part series of lectures from Neil deGrasse Tyson that were refreshingly thorough and weren't watered down. They didn't seem to have it licensed for very long as I think it's already removed from their library.
Regarding stuff that seems to be geared towards 8th graders, that's just what some people want to see and you couldn't force them to watch anything with more substance if you wanted to. Not everyone has to enjoy the finer things. I don't think it's that they don't know there's a difference. It's just boring as all hell to most people.
If you are referring to Cosmos I just double-checked and it is still on there. I only watched the first four episodes so I would have been really disappointed if they had already been removed.
I think a lot of people like the parent assume that there are large amounts of people like themselves that would pay for a dedicated of niche content. I really don't think that is true. As every indie filmmaker and SaaS entrepreneur knows: the number if people that say they would pay is a magnitude more that the people that actually do.
A lot of industry observers are speculating that a la carte cable would be the doom of a large portion of the smaller niche channels that are bundled by the content companies (like Discovery Networks) with their more popular channels when they sell them to the cable companies.
It was actually named something bland like "Neil deGrasse Tyson Lectures." I doubt that was the exact name but something along those lines. Definitely wasn't Cosmos, though.
I suppose it would be very expensive to produce decent content for ad-free streaming distribution, because they'd have to fill a whole hour.
Take Mythbusters and cut out all the repetition and ads; I bet it ends up around 12 minutes that are expensive to produce. Then you have to make basically 4-5 new shows to fill the rest of that space.
