There’s nothing sacrosanct about watching one episode per week of a show. It evolved that way because early TV shows aired live — it took a week to write, rehearse, and perform an episode. If they COULD have done more, they would have.
Binge viewing is how lots of people (including me) enjoy TV now. You can hang onto to smaller plot threads. Plus, I don’t have time during the week. I wanna hunker down on Saturday night and watch a half or whole season of “Mad Men.” And yeah, last weekend I powered through the first fives episodes of “House of Cards.” Loved it.
Waiting for weekly episodes is nonsensical and outmoded. There’s no technical reason for it any longer.
“Binge viewing is how lots of people (including me) enjoy TV now.”
Same here. Do you know of a good 12-step program? Of course, I’d have to be able to power through all 12 steps in a single sitting. I did my first binge view with 24 on DVD. At the time, I called it the crack cocaine of TV. (I can only assume that Jack Bower went to the bathroom, when I paused the action to go. Otherwise, that remains a mystery.)
I only “binge view” (good) serialized TV shows. To me, it’s like reading a real page-turner of a novel. I don’t keep a couple of dozen books on the side table; so that I can read one for 44 minutes, close it, and open the next one, etc. If the book is a page-turner, I’ll binge-read it. Same for serialized TV — much less likely for episodic TV.
Still, my original point remains: is this a good business model for Netflix? If people subscribe for a month, binge view everything they want, then unsubscribe for several months; will Netflix generate enough revenue? I can see it working, if they get to the point where they have too much material to get through in a one-month binge. For me, they’re not there yet; because they don’t have a large enough selection of titles I want to see. (I only get the Canadian Netflix, which probably has fewer titles than the U.S. version — due to licensing and regulatory issues, I’m given to understand.)