"A La Carte" Cable
Having been a Comcast Digital Cable customer for over a year now, I know the power of their addressable set-top boxes. Individual channels are either enabled or disabled, according to my subscribed services, and pay-per-view is achieved without calling someone. One of the things that bugs me is that to get some of the analog cable channels I'd actually watch (ESPN2, SpikeTV, TNT, etc.) I'd have to purchase the Standard Analog tier of service for something like $30 a month.
This Wired article speaks of the FCC grilling the cable companies as to why they don't offer subscribers the ability to subscribe to channels of their choice. It's a good read, but it says the cable companies cite advertising returns as a major reason for not wanting to unbundle channels. I'd have to think there are huge technical reasons as well. I'm not talking about the bitflipper (person or computer system) that would have to keep track of what channels I'm currently subscribed to and paying for. I'm talking about the fact that the analog portion of cable is still the main draw of the service, and until the channels served through analog are migrated to digital, the dream of "a la carte" cable probably won't come to pass. The article mentions signal traps for analog channels that could be installed at customer locations, but I agree with the industry that that's not a feasible solution.
Getting analog content moved to digital is going to be a huge hurdle because of the huge installed base of (analog-)cable-ready TVs. The industry may have to force another phase of mandatory set-top boxes to achieve their digital migration. Remember the late-70's/early-80's where you had the plastic cable box with the sliding channel-changer? Those days may come again, but current technology should allow a relatively feature-rich mandatory STB.
It'll be interesting to see how this unfolds. Note that this issue is (as far as I can tell) currently completely unrelated to the FCC's initiative to move analog broadcasters and over-the-air television receivers to digital.