It was relaxing to me, post- many cable channels (81?), pre- guide/DVR, to just click through.
"Oh, Armageddon is on again. Hercules. (flip, flip, flip)" and then settle on something random, pulled from what's currently playing.
It used to be: survey and then choose from a very limited but rotating subset of all content.
Now it's: choose from all content ever and then find where the content lives and then figure out how much of it you want to watch.
For movies, the new way seems superior. For TV, it feels like a lot has been lost. And overall, I feel like the new system definitely leads to winner-take-all.
It's why I still subscribe to satellite radio.
(and yes, I've thought about subscribing to video service from Spectrum, but I'm not a huge TV watcher)
https://about.netflix.com/en/news/play-something-netflix-doe...
It can pick either something you're already watching (TV series or unfinished movie), or guess something based on what it has learned about you. Of course it's just the Netflix catalog, but that's pretty extensive.
It sounds godawful to me, so I've never used it. But it sounds like almost precisely what you just asked for.
Today, I have about 700 movied ripped from DVDs (and the DVDs still in boxes somewhere), and 500 movies purchased on iTunes. I don't subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, or any other streaming service because, again, 99% of it is dreck I can't stand. So instead I have a collection of 1200 movies that I like and specifically chose and purchased. Some are better than others, but they're all ones I like.
iTunes sells licenses, not movies. Providers can pull content from iTunes and you lose access to whatever you paid for.
There have been cases where users thought they lost a purchase, but it ended up being an issue where they changed storefronts to one where the purchase wasn’t available. The movie reappeared when they went back to the original storefront (and I believe even that behavior was a bug that’s been fixed).
I keep an eye on this because I’ve also purchased a lot of movies from iTunes.
Yes, sometimes you just want to watch a specific show and you want to watch it now, and the streaming services are great for that.
But sometimes you just want to turn on the TV and watch something, anything, without really making a choice. I still have cable because it's included in the rent, and sometimes it's nice to just switch the channel to FXX or something and get maybe an old episode of the Simpsons, or a new episode, or maybe some Family guy, or maybe an old episode of some other comedy series, or maybe something completely new.
And that's nice and has value, but streaming services absolutely suck at that, because you always have to make a choice yourself with them.