I run trivia at a small neighborhood pub every Tuesday night, and the AV setup behind the bar was a mess for the first year. Three boxes stacked on a shelf: one for the projector feed, one for the regular broadcast on the wall TV, one for the karaoke nights on Saturdays. Three remotes. A volunteer who quit because she could never remember which input did what, and another who quietly started unplugging the wrong box when nobody was looking.
Then someone donated a single streaming box, and I spent a Saturday afternoon rewiring. The projector and the wall TV now share the same device. Live channels for the Tuesday broadcast, music for the gaps between rounds, karaoke app for Saturday, all from one menu. The remote count dropped from three to one, and the volunteers stopped asking me which input to press.
What surprised me was how much the consolidation changed the room itself. People stopped waiting for me to fiddle with cables and started running the projector themselves. The quiz got louder, the gaps between rounds got shorter, and the Saturday karaoke crowd started showing up earlier because the room was already alive before they walked in.
I read this short piece on cord-cutting recently that made the same point from the home side. The author was talking about living rooms and family TVs, but the underlying observation is the same. Cable's biggest problem was never really the bill. It was one box doing one job in a corner, while the rest of the room figured out how to work around it. Replace it with a device that already does five things, and the room reorganizes itself around the new hub. That part of the switch I did not expect.