Consumers who are angry at the cost and inflexibility of cable TV have been waiting for someone -- anyone -- to come along and reinvent the business for the online world.

It stood to reason that this was a job for tech giants like Apple, Google and Amazon -- outsiders to the industry who would have nothing to lose by taking on the $170 billion pay television cash machine.

All of those companies have taken shots at creating an online TV bundle. But for the most part, they haven’t delivered, thus far.

Collectively, the tech crowd is beginning to fall behind in this race to an unlikely group: the same pay TV companies -- from Dish to Disney -- that have propped up the traditional ecosystem.

The latest evidence is news that Hulu is launching an online cable TV bundle aimed at cord-cutters. It will mix some of the major broadcasters with cable channels for somewhere on the order of $40 a month. Hulu, of course, is owned by a trio of media behemoths -- 21st Century Fox, Walt Disney Co., and silent partner Comcast Corp.

Elsewhere, consider that satellite provider Dish Network Corp. has not one, but two online “skinny bundles” in the market -- its basic single-stream $20-a-month package and another launched recently that allows multiple streams. Comcast offers a $15-a-month plan in its markets -- just broadcast networks and HBO. And AT&T Inc. has plans to offer an online version of DirecTV, though the details are sketchy.

Wherever you look, ‘old’ media companies are on the forefront of the ‘new’ TV. Sony Corp., with its Vue service, is a notable exception with skinny bundles starting as low as $30 a month in most markets (though they generally don’t yet include broadcast channels).

This situation feels like a paradox, but it’s entirely inevitable.

The survival instincts of the old guard are kicking in as it becomes plain that the ranks of cord-cutters are going to grow, not shrink. They are left with a decision: wait for newcomers to make a play for their customers, or take control of their own fate by jumping into the game of luring cord-cutters themselves.

“If they take the view that skinny bundles are going to happen anyway, that you can’t stop them -- then maybe you say, ‘let’s make sure we’re in every one,’” said Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger, who anticipated the release of a Hulu over-the-top bundle in a note last month.

The trick with these new services is to cram just the most popular channels into a bundle at a price, probably $40 or less, that cord-cutters could swallow. In this regard, the media crowd has some built-in advantages. Hulu’s owners control channels like ABC, ESPN, Fox, Fox News and FX -- and if Comcast comes aboard with its content that adds NBC, USA, MSNBC and so on.

The owners can theoretically calibrate the offering to make sure Hulu winds up with a reasonable cost load and can still enter the market with a price that gives it decent profit margins. Most importantly, they can make sure all their most important networks are part of it.

Tech companies brought the most revolutionary ideas to the table. TV channels should be sold ‘a la carte’, they said, or at least consumers shouldn’t be forced to suffer 200-plus channels they never watch. But they have little to show for making that case, so far.

Apple tried to launch a skinny bundle, but couldn’t secure the content it wanted at a price that cord-cutters would find compelling.

Likewise, Google has toyed with re-imagining the TV bundle, but so far hasn’t moved ahead. The tech behemoth is fiddling with advanced TV ad technology and an ad-free subscription service for YouTube content -- and, of course, fast broadband via Google Fiber -- but it’s not in the skinny TV bundle game at the moment.

Traditional pay TV distributors like Dish have a different type of advantage: they already negotiate for content for a living. When it comes time to negotiate channel-carriage deals with the likes of Time Warner, Viacom or others, gaining rights to channels for online bundles has become a big topic.

In this respect, AT&T Inc. will have arguably the most leverage now that it has acquired DirecTV and is the biggest player in pay TV. Comcast, likewise, is in a strong position to create a bundle bigger than Stream and offer it nationwide -- should it ever choose to break with the tradition of cable companies only competing in certain geographic territories.

The catch for the distribution giants, of course, is that while they may want to experiment with “over-the-top” options, they don’t want to move so fast as to cannibalize their own business.

The tech heavyweights could yet swoop into the market with skinny TV bundles. They still have plenty of their own advantages -- for one thing, their software prowess makes them more likely to create TV viewing experiences that are less maddening than what consumers endure via their typical cable set-top boxes and remotes.

Since they have no loyalty to the bundle, they’ll be willing to offer exactly what consumers want in terms of a channel lineup -- should they ever get the rights. And since they don’t have a traditional business to protect, they can perhaps survive with online cable TV as a loss-leader to get market share, gain traction and refine their service.

In the meantime, many of the “new” entrants are going to look very familiar.

Write to Amol Sharma at amol.sharma@wsj.com