Binge-Watching

What it is

There is no single originator. The practice emerged from a distribution change: releasing a whole season at once rather than one episode a week.

Netflix released all thirteen episodes of House of Cards simultaneously on 1 February 2013. Reed Hastings tied the decision to the subscription model, saying it was fundamental to that control orientation that the company does not cram advertisements down people's throats.

The narrative form adapted to match. Vince Gilligan's hyperserial is a story built to be watched only in full sequence, replacing the episodic reset that older shows relied on so a viewer could drop into any episode and follow it.

The structural point underneath is the one worth carrying. A company funded by subscriptions can optimise purely for what the viewer wants. A company funded by advertising always has a second client, and that client's interests do not automatically line up with the viewer's.

In effect

For anyone reading media history, binge-watching is the one major business model in this library's attention literature that is not an attention-merchant model, which is what makes it useful as a contrast rather than as an example.

For anyone quoting a number, the position is more awkward. The figure of sixty-one per cent that circulates as a House of Cards binge statistic is not a House of Cards poll. It comes from a separate and later survey commissioned by Netflix and conducted by Harris Interactive in late 2013 among nearly fifteen hundred American adults who stream weekly, released that December to justify the all-at-once release model. What it found was that sixty-one per cent of online television streamers watch two or three episodes in one sitting at least every few weeks, which is a very loose definition of bingeing and a general habits question rather than a question about one show. Among the subset who finished a thirteen-episode season within a month, a quarter did so in two days.

There was a real House of Cards survey, and it gives a different and smaller number. Cowen and Company, an independent financial services research firm, found in February 2013 that roughly a tenth of subscribers had watched the show, averaging about six episodes each.

What it does not say

It does not say that bingeing is compulsion. Wu frames it as autonomy-serving, the opposite of the mechanics covered elsewhere in this library under behavioural addiction, and the two should be distinguished rather than equated.

It does not have the evidence base the headline number implies. The sixty-one per cent figure should be treated as company marketing data rather than research: Netflix commissioned it, Netflix released it, and it was designed to support a commercial decision the company had already made. Where a binge statistic is needed, use the Cowen figure and say who produced it.

It does not say the subscription model is free of incentives against the viewer. The claim on this page is narrower, that a subscription business has one client where an advertising business has two.

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