Steaming is slowly going back to that too. Netflix got popular for letting people binge shows that released but increasingly they are putting out shows one episode a week so that they can keep the hype up over a longer period and better monitor/control social media.
Netflix also hides a ton of their content and aggressively pushes whatever is new because it makes it easier for them to get immediate metrics on how popular something is.
Right now, you're pretty much stuck watching whatever is being "streamed in that moment" as it is. For example, netflix added the austin powers movies in October, but by Dec 1 they were removed. You had a window of just 2 months to watch and if you missed them you're stuck waiting for them to "rerun" just like regular TV. I expect that trend to continue with shorter and shorter windows as Netflix pushes people to watch shows when they want you to watch them.
Among other things (like saving on licensing fees), that's at least partially also because it's a lot more efficient to broadcast - it takes more energy and thereby cost to stream obscure bits to one user than to leverage the hot CDN caches and re-stream the same bits to millions of users. So there's a financial incentive to get everyone watching the same swaths of content (in addition to the social angle).
I expect that eventually we may even circle all the way back to time synchronized broadcasts, because it could be even more energy efficient to multicast than to unicast the bits.
We'll see.. right now, the tech for IP multicast doesn't work very well at internet scale, but if that changes...
Then again, to play my own devil's advocate, the surveillance capitalism aspect of building a profile of the users likes and dislikes and selling that data might be worth more than any savings on energy efficiency, so maybe streaming will remain flexible on the surface, to better continue to spy on users habits.
Netflix also hides a ton of their content and aggressively pushes whatever is new because it makes it easier for them to get immediate metrics on how popular something is.
Right now, you're pretty much stuck watching whatever is being "streamed in that moment" as it is. For example, netflix added the austin powers movies in October, but by Dec 1 they were removed. You had a window of just 2 months to watch and if you missed them you're stuck waiting for them to "rerun" just like regular TV. I expect that trend to continue with shorter and shorter windows as Netflix pushes people to watch shows when they want you to watch them.