Personally, the add-on fees and mandatory equipment rental accounted for 50% of the nominal price of my FiOS TV bill. Packages would have barely dented this. Therefore I canceled FiOS TV earlier this year.
By the time the cable providers actually implement a-la-carte, no one under the age of 40 will be subscribing.
The average consumer won't save any money because the price of these channels already reflects average viewership. Those who watch a bunch of different channels would pay a lot more. Only those who watch a very small amount of channels would actually save money.
But paying for access to a channel doesn't really make sense anymore. Why should anyone care what channel content is broadcast on?
Why should someone watching a few hours on two channels pay twice as much compared someone one watched one channel all the time? The later is consuming much more content. Paying by channel is just a shitty way of gauging usage.
A la carte will reduce the amount of content without really reducing prices. Every station will essentially be like TNT or TBS.
Netflix shows that people want the opposite of a la carte. They want an unlimited plan.
It's probably a moot point, video on demand is going to kill cable no matter what.
Cable is a major channel for video on demand, and the cable companies are also the major ISPs, so VOD is win/win for them anyway (especially if they succeed in challenging the FCC Open Internet rules.)
They are going to be "killed" by it the same way that the incumbent wireline telcos were killed by mobile.