Besides sports, the biggest challenge for cord-cutters is to find access to 24-hour news channels they give up when they cancel pay television service.  While cable news often doesn’t actually spend much time on “news” when breaking stories are few and far-between, when something serious does happen, cord-cutters looking for live coverage can and do miss access to news networks.

But now a New York startup, RadixTV, has a solution for news junkies: Rtv.

Yesterday, the company launched a package of four cable news networks — Bloomberg, CNBC, CNBC World, and MSNBC streamed live 24 hours a day for $14.99 a month.

That’s a steep price for four channels, of which MSNBC is arguably the most important.  The company plans to expand to 10 channels in the future, including CNN, Fox News, and international news networks like BBC World, France 24 and Al Jazeera English that American cable companies routinely ignore.

Kaul

Rtv is pitched primarily to Wall Street — financial firms, brokerages, and investment businesses that want access to continuous business news but don’t need a traditional cable package.  In fact, the package is technically only supposed to be sold to business customers, but anyone can sign up if they say they are stock traders, accountants, investors, etc.

Stop the Cap! sampled Rtv this morning and found the service to work well with our broadband connection, although at times crawling news and stock prices found at the bottom of the screen on some channels seemed less smooth than they could be.  It occasionally was distracting.  MSNBC was the most compelling channel in the lineup, although we’d love to see international news channels even more.  But $15 a month is still a high price to pay.

The company’s CEO, Bhupender Kaul, worked for Time Warner Cable for nearly two decades, and believes the future of cable TV is likely to be Internet-based, with programming sold in niche packages like his.  True a-la-carte may be too unwieldy for providers to pull off, but selling groups of channels together might not.  Still, Kaul seems intent on not aggravating the industry as much as earlier cord-cutting online viewing services, which have all since been sued out of existence.  Local broadcast and general interest programming does not come with Rtv.  While a six figure-salaried Wall Street banker won’t mind $15 a month, you might.

Further reading: In New Web TV Service, A Glimpse of the Future