See what you started, Inquisitor?
The fee you pay your cable or satellite provider is more like the money you pay for a newspaper or magazine. The $0.50 you pay for your
Washington Post doesn't come close to paying the salaries of the journalists, editors, etc. It pretty much pays for the printing and distribution of the paper -- it might not even cover that. Everything else comes from advertising.
The cable companies charge $40/mo or whatever to cover their own costs, plus the fees they pay to the networks they re-transmit. But the fees the cable companies pay the networks don't pay Ted Koppel's salary, nor do they provide the million dollars they give out on
Survivor -- once again, it's the advertisers, putting money in the network's pocket, that covers all this.
(The UK broadcast model, if I understand it, is more like public broadcasting in the US. A large part of the funds to run the stations come from the government; this is passed back to the people in the form of the per-set fees. I'm a Yank, so I'm sure I'm missing some of the subtleties here.)
