I oversimplified for brevity. What I mean is, it doesn't require making an informed decision. You just flip it on and start making yes/no decisions. It has a lower barrier to entry in the same way that Tinder has a lower barrier to entry than other dating sites.

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.

Yep. Visiting relatives frequently involves me watching them flip channels until I can't take it anymore and go read.

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.

When the digital transition took place, my TV sat idle for about a year until a line of severe storms rolled through and I decided making it usable again made some sense.

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.

get a tv, a small computer, plex, and a wireless media keyboard

its amazing

TV and Plex yes. But, after having tried all sorts of permutations connecting TVs to media servers and controlling them with keyboards, I find that Chromecast plus a tablet and/or a laptop over WiFi is a far better approach to getting content onto a TV.