Phenomena of the 21 st century Binging is here to stay
Did you know that there’s a website called Bingeclock that will tell you how long it will take to binge-watch 8,000 TV shows, either with or without the opening titles and closing credits?
est and a sustained conversation afterwards. It will be interesting to see whether Netflix has changed strate- gies by the time the fifth and final season of Stranger Things drops. Binge-watching has become such an established part of the cultural landscape that it is difficult to remem- ber that it is a relatively new phenomenon, achieving Collins English Dictionary Word of the Year status as recently as 2015. Collins itself defines binge-watching as “to watch a large number of television programmes (especially all the shows from one series) in succes- sion.” An oft-cited Netflix survey from 2013 concluded that most Americans defined it as watching anywhere between two to six episodes of a show in one sitting. There’s no doubt that binging is the new normal as far as media consumption is concerned, but let’s see how it has changed television. Data from Deloitte suggests that 70% of U.S. consumers binge-watch TV shows, with bingers now watching an average of five episodes per marathon session. Some 31% of those surveyed said they binge TV shows on a week- ly basis, rising to 35% among baby boomers. Drama is the most popular genre. There’s even a website, Bingeclock, which will tell you how long it will take to binge-watch 8,000 individual series with or with- out the opening titles and closing credits. For the re- cord, every season of House of Cards produced so far, without credits, will take you two days, three hours and eight minutes. One of the consequences of meeting the demand for binge-watching is that is has changed the way that television shows are made, particularly in the influential U.S. market. Whereas a typical episodic season in the U.S. once comprised 22 episodes, Netflix and Amazon are making the market more accustomed to much short- er runs, with 10 episodes becoming a popular norm. The rise of the binge-watch model has encouraged traditional broadcasters to follow suit. The BBC, for ex- ample, has experimented with debuts of several ma- jor series in recent years and is rumoured to be plan- ning to greatly expand the initiative to cover all its major new properties. As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings noted mischievously: “We presume HBO is not far be- hind the BBC.” It seems to be a legitimate tactic for broadcasters to make sure they can provide viewers with what they want, when they want to watch it. Binge-watching is not a phenomenon that’s going away anytime soon.
I t was in May this year that Netflix dropped all seven episodes of the first volume of Stranger Things Season 4 online in one nine-hour bundle. The world went crazy, everyone was watching, be- cause Netflix, of course, effectively invented the concept of the binge-watch after House of Cards start- ed the whole thing, with all 13 episodes of Series One dropping in one go. However, all these years later, it seems that Netf- lix and possibly Hulu are the only streaming services sticking to the principle. It is hard to imagine Amazon releasing all of the upcoming episodes of The Rings of Power in one go; you don't spend $450 million on a sin- gle series and then release it all in one go. It also seems as though a weekly release strategy across a range of high-profile originals reduces the risk of customer at- trition over time. In comparing top Netflix (full-sea- son releases) and HBO (weekly releases) shows, the popularity of the former dropped to 80% of the pre- miere month within one month of release compared to four months for the latter. Analytics show that a weekly release helps ensure longevity of engagement. A currently popular option, with Apple and Am- azon in particular, is the semi-binge: an initial drop of two or three episodes, followed by a weekly release schedule. The idea is that it provides the best of both worlds, providing both the initial explosion of inter-
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