A good example to look at is Sky Angel and what national channels they offer on their internet package. They were able to negotiate for Fox News, Fox Business, The Weather Channnel, Versus, and a few others. I'm sure they wanted more but those networks probably didn't want to offer it for cheap. The real problem is that at bare minimum you're going to need $10,000 a month to get a channel on the satellite in acceptable quality. Probably another $10,000 to run the company so you would need 4,000 subscribers at $5 to cover the channel each month.
EDIT: With those numbers I mean a real shoestring operation like those guys in Indiana or Ohio were trying to do last year with the new service that fell apart. You basically have a one or two man operation that farms out all the work to an uplink service.