That’s an interesting comparison that I hadn’t thought of. To me, the difference is in the degree to which the browsing experience is distracting and aggravati

That’s an interesting comparison that I hadn’t thought of. To me, the difference is in the degree to which the browsing experience is distracting and aggravating. Neither myself nor, I think, most people are going to “turn it on, sit back, and relax” with broadcast TV. Instead, you generally go to the menu and scroll around looking for something to watch. I will often mute the TV while doing this, but even if you don’t, it generally doesn’t start playing video and audio from a channel as soon as you hover over it. Instead it continues playing the channel you’re currently on until you’ve chosen to switch. That is a fine browsing experience. I think the other difference is that if you’re flipping channels, you’re tuning into what the channel is actually playing, not an endlessly repeating ad for the channel. It’s getting you to the experience you care about as quickly as possible. Netflix, on the other hand, the minute you stop scrolling, starts loading a preview. This makes the UI less responsive if you want to start scrolling again, which you often do, but oops, you let it sit on a title for just a millisecond too long. If you stick around, you immediately start in on the preview, at full volume. This combination makes the browsing experience super distracting and frustrating. Sometimes I want to discuss with my wife whether to watch a show, but I can’t, because there’s a full volume trailer playing. So I have to mute the TV. It’s so frustrating to not be able to go into a “thinking” state when the experience of browsing is fundamentally a thoughtful one. And 99% of the time if I stop for a second on something, I don’t want to watch a preview. I want to read the description, maybe, and then move on. Anyway, I appreciate that interesting analogy you gave, and I could see how the two things seem similar. I don’t think they are, but even if they were, most of us preferred Netflix because it was not like broadcast TV!