I'm not talking necessarily P2P filesharing here, just the distribution in general. Cartoon Network is streaming their shows from a central server at good speeds. NASA TV does the same. As do numerous other TV stations. There's no technical reason every network on cable can't put their full real-time feed on the internet with commercials, and reap the same profit they would as if it was broadcast over the air or through a cable or satellite TV provider.
As for potentially using P2P technologies for distribution; the incentive is faster downloads- a lot of game companies use this for large game demos; the download is much faster from bittorrent than it is from a traditional server, especially considering how overloaded those servers are the night of a big release. If you're downloading a 10GB blu-ray disk from Sony to your PS3 to watch on the day of the release, it's going to go a lot faster if you can download from 3 neighbors in your neighborhood than for each of you to download it individually from Sony's server, just because the pipe is faster between you.
