Earlier quoted context omitted.
nobody cares enough to actually do it. but what would it take to have near instantaneous channel changes again?, prestarting a second stream in the background? And realistically the linear array of channels is also dead so it really does not matter. so I guess the modern equivalent is having a snappy UI. A horrible idea, as if our current tv features were not already bad enough. the modern equivalent to quick channel…
a workaround for IP-based TVs may be some sort of splash/loading screen that shows recent-ish screenshot of the channel very quickly. It'd still take a long time for picture to start moving, but at least user will see something and could switch away quickly if they don't care about content at all. Of course this will be non-trivial on server side - constantly decode each channel's stream, take a snapshot every few se…
Furthermore, once a user starts flipping channels, since most flipping is just prev/next, you could start proactively sending them the frames for the adjacent channels of where they are, and reduce the show-delay to nearly nothing at all. When they calm down and haven't flipped for a while, stop this to save bandwidth.