[smichel17]

That's where net neutrality comes in, so you don't have to convince ISPs not to throttle your streaming service.

Also, I'm having trouble imagining a small streaming service getting into the ISP business in order to reach a couple thousand people when they can reach hundreds of millions through the internet.

A small ISP getting into the streaming business to provide local content is less outlandish, but still seems rare; I think that's a reasonable price to pay, particularly given that the status quo makes it prohibitively difficult for small ISPs to exist at all, in many places.