They have a one-third stake in Hulu so it probably doesn't matter what medium wins. I'm sure they'll be there.
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.
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.
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.
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.