[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.