Verizon wants to carry more channels on its FiOS TV service, but it only wants to pay for what customers are actually watching. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company is proposing to pay the individual channels by how many "unique views" of five minutes or more they rack up each month, rather than the customary monthly per-subscriber fees that providers currently pay. Furthermore, Verizon wants to use its own set-top box data rather than Nielsen ratings to calculate the views.

The company's chief programming negotiator Terry Denson tells The Journal that Verizon (America’s sixth-largest pay TV provider) is in talks with "midtier and smaller" media companies, and that although negotiations are "inching forward," the disruptive model it's proposing is facing some opposition. If providers tried to adopt a similar model on a larger scale, sports channels would likely be among the hardest hit, since their fees are so high relative to other kinds of programming when controlling for the number of viewers. In any case, it's great to know that Verizon sees the benefit of paying for TV à la carte — now we just have to wait for it to let viewers do the same thing.