Maybe there's not a lot you could have done while keeping the hardware cheap. I can think of a few ways to improve the user experience of channel surfing witho

Maybe there's not a lot you could have done while keeping the hardware cheap. I can think of a few ways to improve the user experience of channel surfing without waiting for an i-frame every time. The cheapest would be to just use a constant neutral-grey i-frame whenever the channel flips, and update that until a real i-frame comes along, while playing the channel audio immediately. Ugly video for a second, but high-action scenes fill in faster. I'd bet that most people could identify an already-watched movie or series before an i-frame comes in, at least 80% of the time. More expensive would be to cache incoming i-frames of channels adjacent to the viewed channel, and use the cached image instead of the grey frame. Looks like a digital channel dropping update frames during a thunderstorm for a second. Prohibitively expensive (back then) would be to use multiple tuners that tune in to channels adjacent to the viewed channel, and then swap the active video and audio when the channel up or channel down buttons are pressed. Drop the channels that just exited the surfing window, and tune in to the ones that just entered it. Surfing speed limited by number of tuners. Televisions still don't do this, even after more than a decade of digital broadcast, and multiple-tuner, multiple-output DVR boxes.