No relation? Fees to content providers are indeed allocated by their popularity, in aggregate. It's why ESPN gets paid (by the cable company) much more than other channels. The only difference in your proposal is the extremely inefficient calculation of millions of individual persons' viewing hours and moving pennies around for each.
How is it more inefficient than what you claim cable TV is doing? And I thought the cable payments were periodically renegotiated, not done in terms of direct a hour-watched -> higher portion translation.
If that is how they do it, then the system I proposed is more complex, yes, but more economically efficient because it more precisely rewards content creators.
Furthermore, as mentioned above, cable double dips by having ads, while the purpose of this system is to fund it without needing ads. So not the same thing.
Seems like you'd already know this, but money doesn't just grow on trees. No ads just means content costs viewers more out-of-wallet dollars. Hulu has a cheap subscription with ads, or a more expensive one without them. HBO doesn't have ads... and you have to pay extra to add it to your cable package. Your "funding" concept is simply a higher price tag.
I'm not sure where my comment implied that money grows on trees; that condescension isn't warranted.
And I left it deliberately vague about how much the monthly fee is -- there are different models consistent with what I described. The point is, to simply apportion directly it over what people actually watch, rather than the clumsy system of paying for a specific provider and some unrelated amount of money going to the content.
