A la carte cable may be coming to a screen near you. Just like iTunes where you can pick and choose your favorite singles, you’ll be able to pick and choose your favorite TV channels. You could ditch MTV in favor of a channel that actually plays music. You could sign up for nothing but sports channels, or ditch ESPN altogether and go for a trio of educational channels, like Discovery, Animal Planet and the History Channel.
Some family advocates applaud the idea, pointing out that families can drop Comedy Central to filter out South Park or MTV to protect their children from all that bumping and grinding.
But not everyone is so happy.
“Adopt higher decency standards,” says Jerry Falwell, “But protect the ability of cable and satellite broadcasters to share the message of God’s love with as large an audience as possible.”
The fear among Christian broadcasters is that paying per channel would mean plummeting audiences for Christian networks like the Trinity Broadcast Network or the Christian Broadcast Network.