Unfortunately the carrier competition can cause the exact opposite effect as what you describe. Let's use the big10 network in central ohio.
Big10 comes in and wants an unreasonable amount of money and requires the cable company to put it on the basic tier so everyone pays. IIRC it was about $1.10/mo/subscriber.
Now if there was only one provider here they'd have a ton of leverage to fight this. But we have WOW and TW. TW fights it, and no surprise WOW picks up the channel right away and uses it to snag customers with commercials "IF you'd like to see the next OSU game" switch to WOW today!
So TW caves in ad now we all pay for this crap channel.
Isn't this more of a bundling vs. a la carte than cost of services? Sure, if you consider purchasing unwanted content to be a cost, but compared to rate-hikes, I'm not sure this is the same arguement.
