The Paradox of Choice - Why I miss the good 'ol TV over Netflix

Too Many Choices Spoils the Mood

Subscription-based channels(like Netflix, PrimeVideo, etc.) have spoilt a particular aspect of the TV experience I'm beginning to miss - the freedom from having to make a choice.

I'm talking about the lack of options when selecting what to watch. The channels on cable TV would have pre-determined showtimes indicating what would screen at what time. You had no choice to pause or rewind the film, and simply had to go with whatever they were screening at the time.

Many times you'd skim through the remote and land on a channel that is half-way into an action film. It didn't matter why Claude Van Damme is beating a bunch of bad guys and what happened in the prior scenes. You'd just sit & enjoy the rest of the movie. It was fun & interesting!

Today, we have the added dimension of Choice. This was supposed to improve our movie-watching experience as we now have the ability to stream whatever we want to watch, pause if we want to take a break, or rewind to a previous scene if we want to re-watch it. How Amazing, isn't it!?

But it can actually have the opposite effect, it can end up negatively affecting your experience. I've lost count of the number of times I've scrolled endlessly through a streaming app like Netflix's/Prime's(or even YouTube's) recommendations, gotten frustrated, and eventually shut my laptop down or go back to listening to music or something.

It does work well when you know you want to watch something particular. But when you are not sure what to watch, your brain doesn't want to decide what to watch. You instead want that choice to be made by the TV or channel. Yet the subscription-based model forces you to - this leads you to aimlessly scroll while your brain doesn't have the appetite to pick anything. It's called the "paradox of choice" - a scenario where having a choice can make it worse for you to decide something. Here is an article that explains this concept.

In such a scenario, the traditional TV comes in handy as it doesn't require you to make a choice. It makes the choice for you. You just scroll through the channels while catching some of the scenes that are playing. This makes it easier as you can simply stop scrolling at any channel that's showing a scene from some movie and jump straight in - even without having the context of what's happened in the movie so far.

My enjoyment of watching TV this way has been same as watching an entire movie. I don't feel like I missed out on anything just because I caught the movie half-way.

I've also observed that I sometimes tend to judge movies/shows based on the 3-4 lines of intro shown by Netflix and decide that it's not worth watching. The TV just forces me to watch the movie so I cannot make that mistake. I can only judge the movie after watching a scene or two - which helps me make a more accurate judgement about the movie.

The Solution

So how can we resolve this paradox? What can streaming sites do?

Well, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. This problem has already been solved by cable TV. All we need to do is add a "TV mode" feature(or maybe call it "play me something"). Take any random movie and start playing it without giving the user a choice. Force the user to watch something.

I'm confident this will lead to a better experience than "infinitely scrolling before watching nothing" alternative.