A La Carte

I'm making a plea to the universe yet again for cable TV providers to supply a la carte channel selection.  My cable bill went up again due to some bogus excuse from Cablevision about the package I had being obsolete so they had to bump me up to a new package...that costs more money.  However, I was told, I do get a new block of Encore movie channels.  Unfortunately, these channels don't seem to be showing anything I'm interested in watching.  Over the weekend, Shogun was showing on two different Encore channels at the same time!!  And this is what I'm paying more money for??  Gee, thanks.  In a perfect world, I'd be able to pick the channels I wanted and not ones pre-selected for me by some cable honcho.  Why do I have so many Spanish language channels when I don't speak Spanish?  Can't I trade those in for the Chiller channel or something else?