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.
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.