Verizon wants to disrupt the television industry with a simple idea: smaller networks and media outlets shouldn’t be paid as much as big networks that offer channels on cable and satellite providers.

Verizon pays a per-subscriber fee for the right to air various channels via FiOS TV (it's the sixth-largest provider in the US). But that fee is a flat amount based on how many potential viewers those channels could have, not the actual number of viewers.

"We are paying for a customer who never goes to the channel," Terry Denson, the phone company's chief programming negotiator, told the Wall Street Journal on Sunday.

The Verizon official also said that he’d like to offer small and midsize channels the chance to charge more or less, based on Verizon’s set-top box data. "If you are willing to give a channel five minutes of your time, the cash register would ring in favor of the programmer," Denson added, declining to say which channels he was working with.

Last month, New York’s Cablevision sued Viacom, charging that the media company was forcing it to pay for channels that it didn’t want. Cablevision has said that it would prefer to pick and choose which channels it wants to carry and be able to drop low-rated channels.

"It feels like certain content players who have a suite of channels attempt to lever the strong ones to prop up the weak ones…without any empirical data to show that these channels are actually viewed or wanted," Denson noted.