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.