[toast0]

OTA channel surfing is slow because before you can see a picture, first you have to tune the digital signal, then you have to wait for an I frame, plus whatever decoder delay and output image processing. In order to make it better, you really need to three tuners, so you can process the streams of the up and down channels. Random access would still be slow, but oh well.

I imagine cable is pretty similar, but I suspect most cable boxes are more capable than tuners in tvs, so they may be running multiple tuners, and I think there's more of a chance of subchannels being useful, too.

[TylerE]

Every cablebox I've ever dealt with is a pile of shit than struggles to display simple text-based menus.

[jedieaston]

Comcast's newer IPTV/X1 boxes are somehow worse, as they have 100x the processing capacity of the old Motorola/Cisco boxes, but use it to run a slow as molasses JS SPA. The Netflix app runs at probably half the speed of the Apple TV (or the Fire TV Stick) and even Comcast's UI can sometimes take upwards of 1-2 seconds to respond to a button press.

[schnable]

X1 uses a cloud-based UI, kind of like X-Windows client and server.

[Symbiote]

TVs sold in Europe are sometimes advertised as having multiple tuners. OTA viewing is the most common type in several countries here.

With digital TV, several channels are multiplexed into a single broadcast frequency, so channel hopping is sometimes OK even with a single tuner.