This is a genuine question, but would you really?

The reason I ask is that 20 years ago the refrain was, "I don't want to pay for a collection of channels on cable. I want to be able to pay per channel." That way you could decide to get ESPN and CNN without having to pay for the Hallmark Channel and Disney. Fast forward 20 years and now we are kinda subscribing per-channel and people don't like that either - because, of course, a channel often has lots of stuff we don't want that we think we're paying for.

The problem is that whether you watch 2 shows or 20 shows, it mostly costs Netflix the same (modulo some residuals and bandwidth/hardware costs). They've already paid to make the show.

Looking at Apple TV, buying the complete series of Better Call Saul would be $100. Looking on Amazon, you can purchase by season at $18-24 per season. We're talking about around $90/mo to subscribe to Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, Max, and Apple TV+ so you could purchase around 4-5 shows per month buying a-la-carte. Movies might become another matter since they're usually $20, but maybe movies aren't something you'd want to rewatch much so renting for $5 would make sense.

I think some of this might come down to whether you're an individual or a family. If you're an individual, 4-5 shows per month would probably be around 40-50 hours of content each month. However, I think a lot of people watch more than that since it comes out to less than 2 hours per day. I guess the questions in my mind are things like how much you watch and whether you think $20 for a season of tv is a fair price (or what you think a fair price would be).

A lot of the time, I find the response to be that people still want access to all the content they like, but they want it at a lower price. The idea is that they think they're paying for things they aren't watching - and they don't want to pay for the stuff they don't like. But it doesn't really work that way. If a company has created 10 shows, they need to get the same amount of money from their customers regardless of whether you watch 2 of them or 10 of them. You might say, "let people who watch 7 of them pay more than me since I only watch 2." That's certainly a form of fairness, but it's hard to really price things that way.

I think paying per show (or paying more for watching more) is an untenable position for content creators because it means that you won't try something new. "If you start streaming another show, that's another $x," really pushes people away from watching your content - which doesn't help you at all. You still have to pay to make the content. People aren't likely to pay for a show without getting into it first. It's hard enough to get people to take a chance on a new show even when it's free (or included in a price people are already paying). If they need to spend money to try out a new show, most shows would never catch on. We all complain about great shows getting canceled. That happens because they couldn't get enough people to watch it even when it was free (or included in a price people are already paying). If they had to convince people to put out money before even knowing if it were good, that would make the problem so much worse.

We see (and discuss) these kinds of monetization issues all the time. How do you get people to pay for content? We've seen browser-plugin based stuff where a site might get compensated from a fee you've paid based on what you're reading. But again we have a key thing there: you don't pay more to read more, it just gets spread more thinly. We've seen things like subscription-blogs/newsletters, but it's hard to get people to pay $x for a single creator.

The problem is that it's hard to get people to give you money for unknown items. It's a lot easier to get them to give you money for a few known items that come packaged with a bunch of unknown items which they might end up liking even more than what initially drew them to your service.