An internet-only TV subscription with smaller, more customized bundles would be great news for cord cutters. However, one of the biggest issues that needs to be resolved seems to be the pricing. From the article:

“Dish wants to reach consumers around 18 to 28 who would rather pay $20 a month for a smaller package of channels to watch on computers or mobile devices, CEO Joseph Clayton said in an interview this month… Negotiations bog down because programmers aren’t willing to sell Dish the rights for a low enough price to make a service viable, he said.”

It makes sense that the price of any such offering would be a stumbling block. If it’s too low, Viacom won’t sign on. if it’s too high, consumers won’t bite. Of course, the question is: how much is too much? We figured we should ask our readers to find out.

Let’s assume, for now, that Dish would sell this type of internet-only offering with a much smaller bundle, which would mainly consist of Viacom channels. You’d pay $10, $20 or $30 a month in return get the ability to stream new episodes of the Daily Show, the Colbert Report and the MTV Music Awards live, when they air on traditional TV. How much would you pay for it? Please let us know by answering the poll below, and feel free to elaborate in the comments!

Want to learn more about watching TV without paying for cable? Then check out my book Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable.

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Vidmind offers operators a white-label Android-based over-the-top box as well as apps for phones and tablets and a web UI, all of which can be custom-branded and used to stream linear and on-demand content to consumers. It also promises to provide operators with the complete backend and cloud infrastructure to run the service. In other words: A complete out of-the-box solution to sign up cord cutters and people in search for cheaper, more interactive TV alternatives.

Who would buy into this kind of service? Internet providers looking to expand into the TV business for example, or smaller local cable operators who want to concentrate on selling Internet services instead of investing a lot of money into future-proofing their TV infrastructure. And anyone who wants to compete with big guys like Cox and Comcast on their home turf, without having any physical cables in the ground or satellites in the sky.

There’s been a lot of talk about the possibility of someone launching this kind of virtual cable operator – a company that transmits all of its programming over the Internet. There’s been some movement in this space, with Dish targeting expats with its Dishworld service, and companies like Skitter experimenting with broadcast streams on Roku and other platforms – but we’ve yet to see a big virtual operator target the entire U.S. market.

Vidmind demonstrates that the tech piece of the puzzle is pretty much solved. Getting the content to actually get people to subscribe could be much harder.

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