Because it costs them money to stream, so it’s in their interest to make sure you don’t just queue up a bunch of stuff and fall asleep.
Not really any different than just leaving the TV on if that’s what you mean.
For broadcast television, especially over the air, there’s no additional load on the provider side for broadcasting to 1 or 1 million people. The TV consumers never have to communicate back to the broadcaster, and this is very efficient from a bandwidth perspective. It’s somewhat similar for cable in most provider situations, the video is broadcast over a wire rather than over the air.
With streaming, each stream has to negotiate with a server to access the stream and the server serves the content to that consumer. This scales as there are more consumers, and the load on the provider increases. Caching layers and CDNs exist to distribute this load, and that is expensive. This is why streaming providers have a “Are you still watching” prompt if they think you’ve stopped watching, since it costs lots to serve the content.
Bamboo answered more thoroughly, but shorthand: streaming and broadcast are fundamentally different.
A simple comparison would be an advertisement on a billboard vs advertisement via junk mail. Fixed cost vs per-person cost.
Because dish and cable still operate in the same way they have for 70 years and a lot of people like it that way. They like that their favorite show comes on at 6pm every Thursday and dish/cable see no reason to offer anything different. It does cost money to create and maintain a system for you to do that and the people who still use dish/cable would most likely not use it.
Unless there have been some changes, dish technology hasn’t changed a lot in 30 years because it costs a lot of money to send up new satellites. For the most part the business for cable hasn’t changed a lot because cable just provides the service not the content.
Streaming on the other hand could do this easily and I think Amazon or Netflix experimented with it but no one really used it.
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