Hello Grawth, and no offense at all, in fact a pleasure hearing a thought out response.
Also I hope it was clear enough, this is more a bit of a niggling worry about that option, not a hard view of mine. And sorry it does sound like I constantly shoot it down, but it comes from a genuine concern.
For example, right at the moment there is an advert for some other encrypted 'porn' channels, a bunch of them (6 I think) and the offer at the moment is something like 12 days for a nominal £1. But I haven't seen enough of what I would be getting and I am just not tempted. Partly old fashioned fears about credit cards (though I use them alot in similar situations, but my motives are low here for that offer), partly laziness. Not the exact same kind of example but similar enough. (Out of interest, how do you feel about that offer? It's there as we speak.)
I also think it took me 'discovering' by accident a particular girl or two while flicking through the full range of sky channels, lingering for a while a couple times, before I started consciously returning to particular channels to search them out. A pin probably would have deflected that process in my situation. Is that a tiny proportion of our experience? Maybe so, although I am talking about all of our first encounters with the channels. If they were all advert screens with pin options, how many of us would have gone through the process? Dunno for sure.
So all in all, I just suspect we wouldn't have the same beast if it became encrypted. I also don't think we would have some of the quality babes either. Further, I worry it would be too tempting for channels to put a charge as part of the encryption as well (each channel, grrr), perhaps compensating for loss of footfall browsing. *depressing* sorry
I do really want a solution as well, my bet is on parallel internet content, though that has it's problems too, and Elite is dragging it's heels.
PS - that challenge for one channel to experiment with it sounds great. I am happy to be proved wrong of course, win-win