It's a pretty simple concept. I'd bet cable a la carte would cost more than what they shovel on us, most of which we ignore. Everyone would be set up with filters to take out 80% of the channels, and that would cost money, because each 80% would be different.
I don't know if it will be more or less.
What I do know is that the entire business model of most of cable is for the content owners to set prices low enough that they can get on "basic" tier to get the widest subscriber base, but as high as they possibly can within that constraint. And that the content owners are often conglomerates, so if you want Discovery Channel you also have to buy Food Network--and vice versa--even though the programming is wildly different, because they're the same parent company. So not all of the bundles are the fault of the cable companies; they get forced into it by the content owners.
So if Discovery couldn't amortize their product over all basic cable subscribers, and had to justify their pricing based on, say, 20% of the cable subscribers who want it, they need to raise their prices fivefold to have constant revenue.
So instead of saying "my cable bill is $100/mo and Food Network is only 1 channel out of 100, so I should only pay $1/month for it", you end up in the situation where Discovery has now created Discovery+, a streaming service that's $5/month... And may go up in price if it's successful.
It all comes down to the cord-cutter's dilemma. If you want to replicate everything you get from cable while doing it entirely through live TV streaming and OTT services, you're likely to spend as much as cable. If you're actually going to be judicious and ONLY subscribe to the content that you absolutely require, you can save money. But at that point you're not getting everything cable gives you [much of which you didn't actually want that much, but was bundled for "free"].
But most people are terrible at both math and economics, so they just believe that a la carte will give them all the content they want for YUUGE savings.
