DOES BINGE-WATCHING BREED ANXIETY Many people immediately jumped on board the binge-watching bandwagon when House of Cards was released in 2013 But the new trend did bring up some worry especially with members of the media When media critic Richard Lawson was assigned to review the series his experience was extreme but not atypical I started on episode six and seven hours later there I was blinking my salty eyes and dying for more Lawson wrote in his review The fear really was that I’d be left behind if I didn’t finish That of course everyone else would watch the whole thing by the start of the work week and I wouldn’t have anything to contribute 8 It turns out as Netflix executives expected the gamble was worth it The release of House of Cards the highly successful Orange Is the New Black and cult-favorite Arrested Development boosted the popularity of a phenomenon called binge-watching In the past people used VHS or DVD box sets or cable TV reruns to watch old or previously released episodes of a TV show in a single sitting But with Netflix viewers could watch multiple episodes of a brand-new television program in rapid succession By December 2013 Netflix had the numbers to prove its experiment was a success In a survey of nearly 1,500 viewers conducted on behalf of Netflix after the release of House of Cards 61 percent of the group admitted to binge-watching content The study further reported that 10
nearly 73 percent of TV streamers said they had positive feelings towards binge streaming 9 I found that binge watching has really taken off due to a perfect storm of better TV our current economic climate and the digital explosion of the last few years said Grant McCracken a cultural anthropologist who contributed to the study But this TV watcher is different the couch potato has awoken And now that services like Netflix have given consumers control over their TV viewing they have declared a new way to watch 10 A COMPLICATED HISTORY By prompting the rise of binge-watching Netflix changed the way people all BINGING THE NEW NORMAL With the release of House of Cards the itch to binge-watch took the world by storm But it wasn’t just a one-time compulsion the phenomenon kept going In June 2016 Netflix introduced The Binge Scale which placed shows on a sliding scale The types of shows viewers prefer to savor slowly were on one end of the spectrum and the types they love to devour all at once were on the other First Netflix studied the viewing of more than 100 serialized TV series across more than 190 countries Then it placed each on the spectrum in terms of the qualities that made the show either habit-forming or something that might inspire calm delayed viewing On the slow thought-provoking end were shows like comedies BoJack Horseman and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Those that were most likely to inspire steady viewing were thrillers such as Breaking Bad Dexter and Sons of Anarchy 11
over the world interact with media content The move also inspired other media companies to follow suit Since 2013 other big players such as Amazon have produced TV series that can be watched over the course of a few sittings But Netflix wasn’t always a trendsetting tech titan worth billions of dollars In fact when its first website launched in 1998 the company had barely a handful of employees They worked out of one conference room in a barren office park in California Over the course of its more than two decades in business Netflix has faced a lot of challenges and made some poor decisions At first the company sold DVDs in addition to renting them One of its cofounders left much to the dismay of some of his staff In the company’s more recent years some of its original content including the 2017 film Bright starring Will Smith was either critically panned or didn’t hit the mark with viewers Still despite setbacks the strength of Netflix as a company continues to rise In 2017 Netflix’s international subscriber pool surpassed the size of its user base in the United States for the first time more than 62 million compared to nearly 55 million 11 12
In the end it is the company’s willingness to not only celebrate achievements but also learn from shortcomings and make adjustments that has led to its steady growth We still have a lot to learn said cofounder and chief executive officer CEO Reed Hastings in 2017 Now we’ve done awfully well in Latin America and in Europe and of course in North America So we’ve learned some things But we have a lot of room to grow in Asia and a lot to figure out still 12 NETFLIX FLOPS Stranger Things Master of None and Glow are among the successful programs on Netflix But the company has also been responsible for producing more than a few shows over the years that were either panned by critics or snubbed by consumers The 2017 series Gypsy starring Naomi Watts is about a psychologist who develops dangerously close relationships with her patients Though the show had many fans a critic from the Village Voice said It’s all fun and games until you desperately start hoping that your protagonist loses her malpractice suit Marvel’s Iron Fist also released in 2017 was similarly well received by audiences but hated by many critics This series takes everything good Marvel has done takes it on a joy ride then returns it scratched bruised and smelling like patchouli and broken promises wrote one reporter from Vox After the 13-hour slog I’m not angry I’m just disappointed 13 13
