[rchaud]

Since moving out of my parents' house ~15 years ago, I have lived without cable TV of any kind, and I miss it.

Live TV offers a 'channel surfing' experience that does not exist on streaming. I want to be able to come home from work and plop down on my couch and just turn the TV on and have something be showing. If I don't like it, I switch channels. I have discovered numerous TV shows, movies and documentaries this way, even if I come across it halfway through an episode.

It is a completely different experience from streaming, where my home screen is basically a billboard, and I have to invest time in selecting something and then start it from Season 1, Episode 1, timestamp 00:00. That seems like a big commitment for something that's recreational, especially when TV shows start off slowly to introduce all the characters.

I come to this realization every time I am in a hotel room that has cable TV. If it's 1 in the morning, I'm fine with watching the Veronica Mars movie or Baby Driver even if it started an hour ago.

[ghaff]

It's definitely something people differ on. I basically never turn on a TV in a hotel room and hardly ever have TV on at home as mostly background--unless it's a webcam or something like that. I actually dropped my live TV last year because I hardly ever used it any longer.

[smashmore]

Channel surfing is nice in that it reduces the number of choices to a small set. Instead of having to pick from an entire streaming catalog, you pick from 10-300 channels which can easily get filtered to a smaller set of choices (2-7) which is easy to pick from without any brain effort.

[rchaud]

For me, the more important factor is randomness and immediacy. Randomness because channel surfing will bring me to a TV show I likely do not know the name of, and I will be shown a scene at a particular timestamp. So I can start watching without the lengthy exposition that's common in the first few episodes of shows.

Immediacy because there is no load time when switching channels, so it's frictionless to jump from sports, to weather, to syndicated TV sitcom. On streaming platforms, there is no such mechanism. Switching to a new show means I start from scratch. I could manually select a random episode and fast forward to a random timestamp, but that would be defeating the purpose.