Netflix invented binge-watching. Now it may have outgrown it. | TechCrunch
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37 replies
Wait, Netflix makes second seasons for their shows? I thought they only did a season one, followed by a cancellation.
Sometimes they do a second season to really get the false hope going
Right, because there was no way for us to watch entire series of shows or movies before Netflix.
A friend let me borrow their Lost seasons over a long weekend. That was the worst binge I've ever lowered myself into lol
Must have been a very long weekend considering Lost runs in at about 120 hours.......
For me it was a hard drive full of DS9 rips passed around the CS department.
I don't think anyone was dropping entire new seasons of shows before Netflix.
That's correct. House of Cards was the first. First Netflix original, first full season by season release. It was a bizarre concept at the time.
That's irrelevant though. You could watch entire seasons of TV shows and series of movies once they were all out on VHS, DVD, or Blu-Ray as box sets.
Lost. Walking Dead. Possibly Breaking Bad.
All three of those shows aired weekly.
You are correct
So why bring them up?
Because they do this thing that they've been doing for a while where they release the whole show to buy after its done airing.
Which has nothing to do with airing an entire new season at once as mentioned in my comment.
Before streaming there was Blu Ray.
Before that was DVDs.
VHS before that.
Etc etc
I had winamp playlists before netflix had red envelopes...
Eh? It certainly wasn't much of a thing especially with ongoing shows, and even for older ones you had to be invested enough to purchase DVDs or wait for cable to re-run (which had a ton of ads)
Binging just means to consume large amounts of something. I guess it means to consume new TV shows, specifically, nowadays. In which case, I'm just an old man yelling at clouds and I'm sorry.
It doesn’t, TechCrunch is always full of shit.
Binge-watching has been a thing for at decades, long before Netflix started enabling it. I had VHS tapes of shows I loved that I taped off of live TV. VHS tapes weren’t super expensive by the late nineties so I had several tapes of the Simpsons.
I also downloaded shows in the early 2000s to binge-watch.
Even on regular television binge watching was possible. CSI, Law&Order, General Hospital, Days of our lives..... And many more would do marathons all the time.
I was going to say I remember Law and Order SVU marathons all the time
You know Netflix streaming came out in 2007, right?
When they did it by mail, dvds were already a thing, Netflix just mailed them. But rental stores already existed.
Loads of people years before Netflix bought DVD-RW drives and just ripped everything they could get their hands on, then dupe their own to trade for what they didn't have. Netflix did drastically increase people's libraries tho. They had a huge disc collection and it didn't matter what order you got them in.
You gotta remember VHS duping was already a thing, cassette tapes before that, and even bootleg 8 tracks before all that
The Internet didn't invent piracy, it just meant people didn't need to leave their house to do it
I'm not abandoning them I just forgot about them during the 5 years between seasons.
I mean, they didn’t invent it. They made it easier and cheaper, at least at first.
Before I unsubbed, it felt like they hired old-school tv execs to start running things. Season cancellations, weekly episode releases, floating the idea of commercials.
It used to be like the Napster of TV, without the legal trouble. Now it’s more like the Apple Music of TV, but where new music is hard to find and only lasts a few months before it’s removed.
I think weekly releases are a good thing even when I'm frustrated finishing this week's episode of XYZ still wanting more.
With how long it takes to produce some shows, being able to finish an entire season in a single afternoon that took two years to make feels like such a let down. I often completely forget about a show that I've binged since I dont have any time to sit with it. I don't really discuss these shows with others since people can be anywhere in the story and I don't want to spoil it, and even if they're finished as well you're probably not going to discuss it more than a few days after watching.
That said, certain types of storytelling work better with one model versus the other. If you just chop a 7-hour movie into ten parts, many of the episodes will end in spots that are anticlimactic, if they make any sense at all. This leaves the audience with a bad taste in their mouths that they stew over all week. Those are better binged until the viewer chooses to take a break.
On the flip side, some shows will have a repeating rhythm to the structure that starts to feel monotonous if you just watch them back to back to back. Of course you can’t control how people engage once everything’s out, but ever was it thus in the era of home media, and when done well the original audience will be there to advocate for the show.
If nothing else, showrunners should be told which way the original release will be done during the writing process.
It's nice to just not have it sometimes. It's gives me more time to doom scroll. I can't even pay attention to shows or movies anymore.
The Napster of TV is streamio
The scientifically most enjoyable way to watch a tv show is one episode a day.
Exactly. I'm usually watching three or four shows, and I watch one episode of each show per night. I usually have one or two on deck for when I finish a show.
I never really enjoyed the binge-watching thing, I only did it for a year before I went back to just watching a few episodes a week
I have. Binge Watching is not my thing.
We are turning into the humans from Wall-E.
What's Netflix ?
It's like pornhub, but without porn.