Every year when I go home for Christmas I watch TV with my parents and I'm always astounded that they pay more money than me to get access to worse content, and it has ads. It's really astounding that folks put up with it.
Also, changing would require learning something new. People genuinely find learning to have a level of discomfort so they avoid it.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/03/learning-hurts-your-...
Something more akin to changing channels like "random cartoon" or "random comedy" would remove one last obstacle in the way of converting cable subscribers.
There'd be a "cable-style-menu" option to mimic the way cable / satellite menus have looked since the late 90's. Maybe 50 or so channels of similar programming running on a time schedule, where you have the option of catching the last 30 minutes of "Terminator 2 - Judgement Day" or watching from the beginning.
Its mindless, but I think that style of consumption is what a lot of people want. It to do the hard work for them.
You could do multiple channels, but I think if you really, really want to capture the "I'm watching this with the rest of the country" feeling, a single live channel would be the safest bet.
It also may have value strategically, because there are some shows that "work" more as a live show, and there are some TV series that have better cultural impact if they are released in a serialized way. For instance I suspect Game Of Thrones has been more successful at permeating culture by releasing one episode a week than it would have been had the whole season been dumped at once.
Financially though, it's not clear this would work for Netflix. Now, depending upon how they pay for a given piece of content, they're paying for a lot of programming being used as background noise. You'd have to get enough people buying Netflix subscriptions because of this added option to offset the higher costs.
I work in the streaming industry, and offering the same "background noise" quality is something that still eludes us. I personally believe that as soon as you introduce any sort of possibility of explicit input from the user (skip, pause), or even implicit (by the way, all of this is also available on demand in our catalogue) the experience is tainted. Subconsciously we know that we are needlessly watching something we should be tailoring ourselves.
The power of the linear channels is that they are so severely limited. Streaming services has long tauted that they are superior because they aren't. Tough problem.
If the platform were to offer a random choice, the fact that the resulting view was not organic would need to be tracked separately. Conversely, you'd want a better way of figuring out whether the viewer was satisfied with the content after all. These problems require nontrivial effort.
Right now, things are much easier. The viewer always makes a choice, ostensibly a conscious choice, and all views factor into aggregate numbers that correlate with show popularity.
The UI could even continue doing separate random programs, but allow the watcher to say "Keep Watching this", locking in their choice and making it a "discovered" show.
So just track it separately and don't interpret it the same way as deliberately chosen shows. I don't see the problem.
That...doesn't jive with the limited exposure I've had to cable television. Hundreds of channels and very little good on, I suspect people waste a lot of time flipping through.
Trust me, having grown up in a broadcast and then cable TV household, there's a habituality to TV consumption that isn't there in streaming.
Though streaming has its own habituality in the form of bingeing.
Having never owned a TV myself, I'm actually considering buying one now. The fact that shows are actually getting better, combined with how easy it is to wait for other people to be a filter, combined with no ads makes TV actually attractive to me for the first time since I was like 5.
But still zero reason to pay for cable.
Went out, bought a nice directional antenna, bought a converter box from a friend, turned it on.
5 minutes later I realized I had zero tolerance for ads shouting at me, boxed everything up, and eventually took the TV to recycling. (It also nearly put me in the hospital, big CRTs are big.)
My iPad and Netflix/iTunes are all I need. Someday maybe I'll get a 13" iPad Pro and stick it on a wall, but I doubt it.
its amazing
One thing I’d kind of like on Netflix and their ilk would be a way to choose a series and say “play me a random episode“. Some shows work well that way. I don’t want to have to go choose through six seasons to find something that appeals to me, I’ll just take an episode. Surprise me.