Dish Network is the pay-TV company that gets it

While its competitors were fighting about Weather Channel royalty fees and customer service fiascos, Dish Network was blazing ahead to become an exceedingly relevant TV provider in a 21st century landscape. Its new effort to merge with T-Mobile is just the latest example.

As has been widely reported, Dish and T-Mobile are in discussions to become one entity that would give a huge amount of wireless spectrum to T-Mobile and give Dish a completely unique position in the mobile marketplace.

The mobile market is filled with complicated spectrum laws and antitrust watchdogs preventing any major shakeups, and the pay-TV space has been dominated by egos and bullying for the better part of 30 years. This is the kind of merger that could actually mark a conceptual change in these two behemoth industries.

The merger with T-Mobile cannot be looked at in a vacuum. In a market where most pay TV companies are becoming increasingly irrelevant and only succeeding in becoming more of a subject of vitriol and ridicule, Dish has long been the outsider. This is not a case of a satellite TV company wanting to become relevant. It in instead the latest chapter of the only long-standing TV provider that has pushed for relevance for years.

Dish has been allowing its traditional customers to remotely stream virtually any live TV channel or DVR'ed content from their smartphone since 2013. The year before that was when it introduced the commercial-skipping Hopper DVR, a technology that was so disruptive that networks, most vocally CBS, expressed unparalleled rage.

Then, at CES earlier this year, Dish announced Sling TV, which is now the preeminent solution for streaming live satellite TV across a variety of devices. And unlike so many announcements that are all about hype without any specific roadmap to launch, Sling TV launched the very next month.

Dish's approach toward Sling TV is refreshing. The company explicitly and unapologetically says it is only targeting people who have already cut the cord, or were never bound to a cord to begin with; it's not trying to steal traditional pay TV customers. If a customer is even thinking about signing up for cable or satellite, Sling TV does not want that customer.

That such a product is coming from a traditional provider is the perfect example of just how much Dish Network "gets it". Time Warner Cable, Cox, Comcast, and the rest have now finally begun to offer what today are seemingly basic necessities -- things like streaming live TV from a mobile device or being able to watch on-demand content from anywhere. Most of the providers only began that kind of innovation after fighting for years, to their own detriment, to prevent it. And even still, you will need old-school cable or satellite subscriptions and hardware leases that belong in the 1990s.

Oh, and one more thing: Sling TV lets customers subscribe and unsubscribe with a few button clicks. No need to wait for 5-hour installation windows or fight with anti-cancellation "retention specialists".

Dish's daring vision never to cling to the status quo seems a perfect marriage with T-Mobile, which has been desperate over the past few years to appear as the edgier mobile carrier.

It would be a very compelling case for T-Mobile if it were able to offer some kind of exclusive deal with Sling TV. The idea that customers could potentially find themselves paying for HBO, ESPN, and the rest of their favorite live TV channels as part of their smartphone bill, does not seem like some crazy far-off concept. It sounds like the perfect forward-thinking reality of today's content consumption landscape.

And Dish Network is the only one that could pull it off. This kind of merger would be a poster child for questioning the status quo and understanding that no matter how gigantic or unmovable an industry may seem, paradigm shifts will always be inevitable. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out.