1000 TV channels: nothing to see here, please move along

The 'paradox of choice' explains why endless streaming libraries still leave us with nothing to watch. The average subscriber burns nearly five days a year simply scrolling. More choice should mean better viewer satisfaction, but Netflix, Apple TV+ and all the rest are discovering the opposite. Below we unpack why the 'more is more' strategy is backfiring, and what actually works instead.

It's a Thursday night and you're on the sofa.

A tub of popcorn rests nearby. A beer is in one hand. The TV remote is in the other.

You were looking forward to some ‘me time’. A chance to watch a movie or a show. To veg out and recharge. A moment of relaxation. An escape from the grind.

But instead, you're getting more frustrated by the second.

Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Your search for something good to watch is going nowhere. It's an endless flow of cookie-cutter cop shows, ancient documentaries, soap operas and movies you saw long ago.

We live in an age where we have more viewing choice than ever, but somehow, there's still nothing great to watch.

It shouldn’t be like this.

What the hell is going on?

The jam problem

The answer has a name, and it isn't new. Psychologist Barry Schwartz called it the paradox of choice: past a certain point, more options don't make us happier, they make us worse at choosing anything at all.

The clearest proof of this came from a grocery store in 2000. Researchers Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up two jam-tasting stalls in a supermarket. One stall offered six flavours, the other twenty-four. The bigger display pulled in more browsers, but only 3% bought a jar. At the smaller stand, the sales figure was a comfy 30%.

More options grabbed attention, but they also killed commitment. The shoppers weren't short of choice, they just lacked the confidence to make a selection.

And that's the problem. It doesn't matter what it is - TV, books, music, even eating out. Once we get past about nine options, most of us start feeling overwhelmed. There are just too many choices. Every added alternative becomes a small tax: more to weigh up and a rising bar for what counts as good enough.

Then two emotions step in make it worse.

The first is opportunity cost. Each new option you don't pick is a small, nagging reminder of what you may be missing - FOMO - which is exactly why a longer menu breeds more regret, not less. The second is expectation. Give someone twenty-four jams and they start expecting the perfect spread. Give them a thousand TV channels and they start expecting the perfect show, on demand, all the time. Reality was never going to deliver that.

Swap jam for Saturday night telly and you've got the entire streaming industry in a nutshell… more flavours, but flavourless.

We built a bigger jam aisle

According to a 2024 US survey, the average streaming subscriber now spends 110 hours a year just deciding what to watch. That's the best part of five days scrolling but not watching. A fifth of subscribers also say it's harder to find something worth their time now than it was a decade ago, and 41% blame libraries that have simply grown too big to browse.

Back in 2019, Nielsen found the average adult took more than seven minutes to pick something to watch, and only a third of viewers bothered browsing the menu before giving up.

It’s only got worse since then.

We didn't fix the jam problem. We built a bigger jam aisle, then filled it with products that nobody likes the taste of.

What it means for the people making the jam

Making genuinely great television is expensive and time consuming – the two enemies of profit. In response, many platforms have leaned into the cheaper alternative: overseas dramas dubbed on a budget, decades-old documentaries, endless reruns and a swelling tide of reality and game shows that cost a fraction of scripted drama to produce.

Make no mistake, there's real money behind this trend. Global content spending is forecast to hit $255 billion in 2026, and streaming is the fastest-growing slice of it, up 6% to roughly $101 billion. However, more money isn't buying more good television so much as just more television. A lot of what you see is filler built for the ‘scroll factor’: an endless stream designed to keep you browsing on the platform instead of switching to a competitor.

Of course, the ‘more is more’ strategy does work somewhere. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram thrive on an infinite scroll because their audiences expect exactly that: quick, homemade, disposable content where quantity, not quality, is the point. Nobody sits down to a TikTok session hoping for two hours of considered drama.

Unfortunately, streaming borrowed the social scroll idea without borrowing the audience's expectations that go with it, and that mismatch is a large part of ‘what the hell is going on’.

And for the people eating the jam…

Netflix, still the platform most people trust to have something worth their time, keeps subscriber churn down to an impressive 2% a month. Meanwhile, the platforms relying hardest on the ‘more is more’ model are running at 7% or 8%. One recent report found that 49% of Americans think the quality of what's streaming has fallen over the past two years, and 43% were planning to cancel at least one service within three months. This is the paradox of choice showing up on a balance sheet somewhere. The streamers should be worried.

As for Apple TV+, they make an interesting exception - almost. Rather than chase volume, they’ve kept spending high and their library small, and its programming punches well above its weight. Apple sits third in original demand share behind only Amazon and Netflix, with a catalogue that’s just a fraction of their size.

However, prestige alone doesn't solve the paradox. Without a deep back catalogue between big releases, Apple subscribers run out of 'new' very fast and then the old frustrations return.

Which tells you all you need to know about what audiences really want: brilliant television, in real quantity, whenever we fancy it. Nobody has built that yet. There's a decent argument nobody can, at least not at a price anyone would pay.

And that brings us to Gen Z, who always do things differently. This cohort may have landed on the most honest response of all. Research has found that 59% of Gen Z viewers subscribe to a platform purely to watch one show, then they cancel. Call it fickle if you like, but the maths say something else: rotating through one service at a time instead of stacking four saves the average viewer around 500 bucks a year.

That’s smart thinking.

Gen Z are the first generation to demonstrate that streaming is a cost they resent paying for. Instead of sitting back and dropping cash every month, they're managing it like the subscription it is rather than the appointment television it replaced.

Put down the jam and slowly back away

Put all these threads together and an exodus looks plausible. Not a mass walkout, more like a slow and costly leak: subscribers leaving because they find no platform has enough good content to earn a permanent seat at the table.

When this happens it be will be brutal for the streamers – although I think we know how they’ll react.

At first, you’ll see more bundling as they try to snare viewers with fewer options. Then, when that doesn’t work, they’ll go for price rises to offset the churn. Then, when that only speeds up the exit, they’ll try to follow Apple's lead into a ‘fewer is better’ strategy – but it seems unlikely many can successfully pull that off. Mergers will appear. Some platforms will fade away.

And that puts us in an interesting place.

We could be sitting on the very peak of peak TV and it’s all downhill from here.

Is there a better way to watch?

Yes there is, and it looks a lot like television did before the current 'all you can eat buffet' era: fewer, better choices, but curated for you rather than assembled by you.

Appointment viewing has crept back into fashion. A show airs, you turn up for it, and a decision gets made on your behalf. It's why "Top 10 tonight" lists exist on every platform, why algorithms nudge you toward one specific title instead of presenting the whole library, and why the biggest hits tend to be the ones everyone's watching in the same week rather than the ones buried on page four of a menu. Scarcity becomes the winning feature. Only now it’s engineered by an algorithm instead of a broadcaster's schedule.

However, we’re still some ways away from that.

In the meantime, the practical answer is to pick two or three services you genuinely trust rather than drifting into six you barely open. Let go of the idea that more subscriptions create a better chance of finding something good. On the evidence so far, they won’t.

Final word - back on the sofa

The popcorn's gone cold and the beer's got warm. You've been scrolling for twenty minutes and settled, eventually, on a flick you've seen before.

It isn't that there's nothing to watch, it’s that there's too much, and most of it is not for you. The paradox of choice didn't arrive with streaming, but streaming built it a permanent home and dressed it up as freedom.

Don’t believe the hype.

When it comes to TV, more isn’t more, it’s always less.

How often do you sit down to watch TV and come up empty handed? Is it more often than not? So what do you do instead?

Follow Chris Godfrey for regular insights and opinion on the business of content & marketing. Subscribe to CONTENTED now

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