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LOGO and BYU both air a lot of Muppet stuff. 

Two very different demographics, with a rather peculiar common interest. 

Okay.
The next time you eat out, you get your steak and they bring you a tofu butternut pepperoni quiche.  You ask why they gave it to you - you didn't order it.They explain that serving you that crime-on-a-plate makes your steak a few cents cheaper.
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You're going to shrug and enjoy your steak without thinking the restaurant is bizarre?  Bizarre enough to not return?  You wouldn't just rather get your steak next time?

If someone paid the restaurant to give me food, I will just take the food. And then, maybe I would eat it later. Or I’d feed it to a dog or something.

It isn’t the same as the shopping channels, but honestly, restaurants are almost never a-la-carte, and the pricing of a la carte places can be annoying. I run into this often, because I am perpetually begin given french fries I don’t want, but I also wouldn’t pay extra at an a la carte place offering tater tot’s or wing chips at three dollars extra.

If someone paid the restaurant to give me food, I will just take the food. And then, maybe I would eat it later. Or I’d feed it to a dog or something.

It isn’t the same as the shopping channels, but honestly, restaurants are almost never a-la-carte, and the pricing of a la carte places can be annoying. I run into this often, because I am perpetually begin given french fries I don’t want, but I also wouldn’t pay extra at an a la carte place offering tater tot’s or wing chips at three dollars extra.

I used to order apps instead of meals, because they were a lot of food for half the price.  But they wised up about 10-12 years ago.

If someone paid the restaurant to give me food, I will just take the food. And then, maybe I would eat it later. Or I’d feed it to a dog or something.

It isn’t the same as the shopping channels, but honestly, restaurants are almost never a-la-carte, and the pricing of a la carte places can be annoying. I run into this often, because I am perpetually begin given french fries I don’t want, but I also wouldn’t pay extra at an a la carte place offering tater tot’s or wing chips at three dollars extra.

Actually the best analogy would be a buffet.

You go to a buffet, and you're not interested in 100% of the options. But they're trying to cater to as many people as possible, so they want a wide variety of food.

If the egg lobby starts paying buffet restaurants to include tofu butternut pepperoni quiche in their buffet, that subsidizes the buffet prices for everyone else without wronging anyone EXCEPT those who might enjoy the long tail other product that is squeezed out from the buffet's offering to make room for the quiche. But that offering is clearly not popular enough, or it would supplant something else above quiche level. 

The cable/satellite operators are trying to fit as much content in as they can... But they run out of content that they can afford to pay for [and profitably sell to consumers] before they run out of bandwidth. So they sell that extra bandwidth to shopping channels. You don't have to watch them, but they reduce the overall cost for subscribers given that the bandwidth is a fixed cost.

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.

Imagine I want channels 2 3 6 8 9 but my neighbor wants 2 4 5 8 10.  Or, they could give us both 2 3 5 6 8 and not have to customize anything.

I'm still astonished how many shopping channels somehow survive.  If I need something I use Amazon, generally speaking, and done.

These channels have to pay people to create the material to "air".  It's amazing to me.

very easy to give customers only the channels they want to pay for with IPTV

not as easy with older digital tech, but possible.

there would be a set top box at each TV

the FCC just has to give the word

Confused about the last line...

Are you saying that the FCC should mandate that TV providers offer a la carte programming? Or that the FCC merely needs to allow it?

Because it's allowed right now, and not mandated. I'm not sure I agree with the idea that the FCC should mandate this.