You still need to think about what you want to watch, and deliberately make it happen. A very large market segment wants no more than a half-dozen choices, pick one, and let it run indefinitely.
For the same reason, the 90 page channel listing, dominated by "your not subscribed to this but we're going to show it to you anyway in hopes you might upgrade to include it" and "here's 37 duplicate channels all showing the same movie at slightly offset timeslots", has got to be driving people away - many staying only because there isn't a brain-dead-easy option hearkening to the days of 4 channels.
The menu I was talking about wasn't the typical channel listing. That's even worse to the point where I never use it. When I goto my friend's house where he has a ton of premium channels you can literally spend 3 hours just looking through that list to find something.
I hope that market segment with half a dozen choices never becomes fully main stream. I like choice in moderation (ie. web frameworks with opinions) but movies are just entirely different.
There's just too many interesting genres and type of movies to filter a list of 100,000 movies down to a handful. It's a very complicated problem to solve and might be unsolvable until we have huge break throughs in how machines process human input.
Example, how would you solve this problem:
Customer A watches 5 comedies in a row then is proposed a choice of 3 movies. 1 comedy, 1 sci-fi and 1 romance.
If customer A picks the sci-fi movie you cannot conclude that he didn't like the comedy or romance choices. He just happened to prefer watching a sci-fi movie that night. You don't even know the outside conditions too. Maybe his friend is over sitting in the room while they pick the movie, you simply cannot know.
This is a great point. The 8 billion channel situation with an unusable guide channel seems like it was put together and maintained by a bunch of cokeheads with no sense of a sane user experience.
For the same reason, the 90 page channel listing, dominated by "your not subscribed to this but we're going to show it to you anyway in hopes you might upgrade to include it" and "here's 37 duplicate channels all showing the same movie at slightly offset timeslots", has got to be driving people away - many staying only because there isn't a brain-dead-easy option hearkening to the days of 4 channels.