if everybody was able to only get the channels they actually watch... the expenses for both the companies that produce the content, as well as distribute the content would be the same. so unless only a very small percentage of the subscribers get a la carte.. prices would remain roughly the same. the cost to make a channel remains X... its just that your share of X is now much greater, espescially for a non-popular channel. it is through the current method of "everybody pays a little for everything".. that there can even be an everything.. if people only paid for what they wanted.. a LOT of stuff would go away and only the top dozen or so channels could probably hope to survive.

I would say that this has nothing to do with monopoly and a lot to do with the prices going back up to what they should be, with the cost of technology and all. It takes a LOT of processing power to decrypt and play an HD disk so it is understandable that at this point the hardware would be expensive. also, there are a lot of R&D costs to recover that were spent in developing the blu-ray players. over time as the technology gets cheaper and more units get sold, prices will go down with competition.