But the track record isn’t good.

Name any number of companies like AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon that have made moves into TV-media distribution business and then looked to slowly back away.

Recent maneuvers include AT&T with DirecTV. T-Mobile, in early 2021, with its own short-lived virtual pay-TV service TVision.

Last September, Verizon sold off its Verizon Media Group -- which includes Yahoo -- to investment company Apollo Global Management. The deal was worth $5 billion.

Now Verizon is trying one more time, with something called +play.

Verizon says the new business is “a digital store for your subscriptions.” Okay, that's fair enough -- but what's the big upside here? Can Verizon do something here that Roku or Amazon Fire TV do not or that existing virtual pay TV providers are not doing?

The +play testing will include Netflix, Disney’s three streaming services (Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+), Discovery+, three A+E Networks nets, three from AMC+, and TelevisaUnivision's Spanish-language Vix.

While it does not sound like a complete package of all possible premium TV-video apps/channels available, this might work for those long-time legacy pay TV consumers who really want to pick and choose individual TV networks to form their whole packages.

It would be a competitive push against the likes of Sling TV, DirecTV Stream, and YouTube TV. The growth of these services continues to lose steam-- perhaps in part because they increasingly aren’t all that cheap and are looking more like traditional cable, satellite, and telco pay TV services.

Okay, so now there is another player -- and consumers are looking for options, perhaps from their mobile and/or broadband communications company. Verizon says it connects with 100 million people daily. So why not?

And as cord-cutting continues, consumers are looking for easier access.

If one is staring them in the face -- via a screen -- when it comes to paying for their mobile phone or broadband monthly bill, it can provide a quick marketing tool.

And for Verizon, if they can benefit from additional revenue share from a fractionalizing distribution system where content partners are still looking for another distribution point? Well, there is another ‘why not’.

Maybe Verizon is looking much further down the road when new, young consumers dominate the new TV-streaming business -- and they are really picking exactly the content they want, not being spoon-fed packages of programming that many older consumers -- for the most part -- are not ready to give up.