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.
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.
Nowadays, especially with places like Netflix releasing a whole season of a show at once, it is often the case that all your friends and coworkers are all at different points in the series.
I think being over the internet is the killer feature. Cable companies had on demand for a decade before netflix streaming, being over the internet meant you were not locked into a monopoly or duopoly.
That said, I agree it seems old-timey and the wrong way of doing it.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/7/21553998/netflix-linear-c...
[1]: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/11/06/netflix-is-experime...
[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/06/netflix-tests-a-programmed...
There's a generation growing up now with a very different experience.
I distinctly remember my kid experiencing cable for the first time around age 3 or 4 (rainy day while we were staying at a cottage): "this is in the middle, start it over at the beginning", "I want to pick a different episode" and when the first commercial came on "hey! Put my show back on! I don't want to watch this".
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/17/cable-and-s...
I subscribe to Hulu Live for a portion of the year when the European football season is in full swing. Typically I tune in for the second half of the season.
But as soon as the season wraps and the major trophies or shields are awarded, I downgrade to the regular subscription.
I just don’t watch enough TV, on demand or live, to justify it otherwise.
We’ve got Netflix, Hulu, HBO (included with cell plan), and Disney. That already feels like one too many but our family has a weird breakdown:
- I watch shows on Hulu
- My wife watches shows on Netflix
- My wife and I watch shows on HBO together
- Our family (kids + adults) watch shows on Disney
It’s not ideal but we have the disposable income for it and so it is what it is.
The killer feature of services like Netflix is not really the "over the internet" part, it's the "watch any show on demand" and "massive library so you can start watching from S1E1, if you want to". Streaming live TV services fail at both of these.
CloudDVR I guess kind of gets part way to on-demand, but in a frustratingly stupid way. Clearly, the service just has a single recording of every show from every channel. If a subscriber clicks "record" all it is really doing is opting them in to access to future recordings. I assume people can't get access to old recordings (then it would just be "on demand", not "DVR"). Are there also limits on how many recordings you can access (emulating a limited size hard drive)? Do recordings go away after some time? Does it also record commercials, and does it allow skipping?
Everything about these just seems like a relic of a by-gone era. They've even added artificial limitations to emulate the old actual technical limitations. The only real thing they have going for them is access to content not available on other streaming services, Otherwise everything about a service like Netflix seems to be superior in every way. If Netflix (or similar service) had live sports streaming and all the other shows, even at the same price as traditional cable, my guess is the cable industry would be dead within a year.