[buckeye]

I would hazard a guess its because the TV companies and suppliers would like to keep the status quo of trying to force us to buy bundles of channels we don't want in order to gain access to the channels we do want.
If we could just pay for what we want many channels would go out of business and the bundles offered by the suppliers would look far less appealing.

As I've posted elsewhere on these forums I am fortunate enough to have a very good friend in the US who allows me to use their cable TV login, its not only the paucity of live TV options we have here compared to America but also with the exception of BBC Iplayer most options we do have are light years away from those offered to our colonial cousins in terms of quality, when I watch an online stream from most US broadcasters they are almost on a par with broadcast HD, over here I've found only Iplayer comes close to that, BT Sport and Now TV are not bad but not a patch on what I see on the US services.

Hopefully we're just a tad behind the times and our broadcasters will see sense in the next year or two.