I don't think that ads as a way of finding things you may be interested in is necessarily bad, but it's certainly not the only way. If I want to find out what's current or upcoming in videogames I can go to Eurogamer, Polygon, Gematsu, or another site with that kind of focus. (Actually knowing which places are best for your interests and which should be filtered out is another issue, of course...)

If a random ad happens to be something I'm curious about then great, but I find that it's more often not.

2 is a fair point, though I wonder if your shared interests as friends (making assumptions here) couldn't guide your search?

Cable as 'a curated platform of best video content, being streaming 24/7' is interesting, but the current "best" just may not be someone's thing. Again I think it comes down to wanting to choose precisely what you watch, though I see your point that you don't always know (though if you don't know what you want to watch, maybe doing something else is the option?).