If I were king of netflix...

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.

I think you're really onto something, but I would offer a slight modification. The value of watching something live is knowing it's an experience you are sharing with other people. Have a single live channel, where the purpose of the channel is that it's the live one that people across the country can be watching at the same time.

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.

Personally, I totally hate it but a lot of people basically turn on the TV when they walk into a room.

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 really like this idea. I still have cable, but mostly for background noise. When I’m doing something else, I don’t want to have to pick something specific on the TV.

I usually go for long old shows I love and start them from S1E1

My wife and I do that with The Office. You never have to pay attention, but you can have it as background and catch jokes here and there.

That seems like the sort of thing they'd totally do for one of their hackaton projects.

This is the approach some of the apps are taking these days, e.g Pluto TV.

The swedish national television streaming service had a big push for that a few years back. They launched a completely separate streaming service to mimic the linear experience, very much like what you describe. It didn't catch on at all.

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.

The 'random' button would interfere with their aggregate viewership tracking and recommendation algorithms. When the viewer appears to select a particular show to watch, you can have reasonable faith in the viewership numbers.

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.

I'm sure they have Referrer metrics, and could add a "from Random" flag.

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.

They should seriously consider "channels" whereby something random is always playing by genre.

Not even random. They could generate channels based on their observations of what you "switch channel" from.

>If the platform were to offer a random choice, the fact that the resulting view was not organic would need to be tracked separately

So just track it separately and don't interpret it the same way as deliberately chosen shows. I don't see the problem.

They could even sell a "pseudo DVR" box, with themed channels, scheduled movies, in addition to all the usual streaming features.

Seems like a problem that could be solved with an addon for Chrome and FF, at least...