DirecTV: Web TV Is Easy to Do, But We Can’t Figure Out Why We’d Do It

Dish Networks is trying to put together an “over the top” pay-TV offering, which would deliver cable channels over the Web, priced at around $30 a month.

But rival satellite service DirecTV doesn’t seem all that intrigued by the notion.

CEO Mike White talked about the pros and cons of selling Web TV. Short version: It’s easy, technically speaking, to stream pay TV over the Internet. But it’s hard to make much money assembling a package of channels that the TV programmers would be willing to sell, at a price consumers would be willing to pay -- because no one in the TV Industrial Complex wants to fundamentally disrupt their own business, which is still working very nicely.