Binge Watching?
Find yourself watching a full season of your favorite show in a matter of hours? Finding yourself out of sync at work and needing a 5hour energy drink to maintain focus? Do you think that watching commercials are "so 1999"? Did you get that new iPhone 6 for the beautiful retina display to show every titillating pixel of drama unfolding while on a plane, train or automobile? If you find yourself answering yes to any of these questions, then you may be… Binge Watching!
According to Wikipedia, Binge Watching , also called binge-viewing, is the practice of watching television for longer time spans than usual, usually of a single television show. In a survey conducted by Netflix in February 2014, 73% of people define binge-watching as “watching between 2-3 episodes of the same TV show in one sitting.” Binge-watching as an observed cultural phenomenon has become popular with the rise of online media services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime with which the viewer can watch television shows and movies on-demand.
In fact, this phenomenon was realize in 1999 with the introduction of TiVo ! Ever since then, DVR and other streaming means have dominated our already short attention span to absolutely ZERO tolerance for commercials!
I could remember this binge watching phenomenon (before I knew what it was) back in 2005 when I was singing on Celebrity Cruiselines and DVDs were dispersed throughout the cast of the show I was a part of! The show that we shared amongst each other was the show "Lost"! For those who lived under a rock during its time, it was a show that featured castaways on a mysterious island with the backdrop of their lives leading to them being stranded on the island!
Given that we didn't have any immediate access to any network television, we took it amongst ourselves to have friends from home burn DVDs for us all to watch! Whoever would watch one DVD of episodes would then pass it along to the next person in the cast! It bonded us together for the duration of our 6 month contract together!
Now we fast forward 10 years later and things have become more accessible and more immediate! Even cable companies have started adding channels dedicated for network TV shows to be ON DEMAND!
Show that I enjoy binge watching includes...
Breaking Bad, Walking Dead (AMC) House of Cards (Netflix), Orange is the New Black (Netflix), Blacklist (NBC), The Slap (NBC), Nashville (ABC), How to Get Away With Murder (ABC) and now Secrets and Lies (ABC)
Although this phenomenon has swept us all by storm, I'm starting to see how the demand for these shows are starting to become the achilles heel of this phenomenon! You see, some of these shows are starting to do "Semi-Season Finales"! This cheapens the product and have writers of the shows scurrying to write subpar scripts for the next group of episodes! Some shows have gone as far as to cheat this binging (in my eyes)
So I'm cruising along watching uninterrupted the first few seasons of Breaking Bad and then It happened... Popularity! I mean the Internet BLEW UP with it's success after starting off slow the first 2 seasons! When it's popularity hit a fever pitch, the show ran out of free episodes on Netflix!
Even creator Vince Gilligan thanked the on demand video service Netflix at the Emmy Awards in September 2013. He even went as far as to say that Netflix "kept us on the air". Luckily for Gilligan the "shortage" mixed with popularity, garnered the last 2 seasons to be for purchase on Apple TV to continue your binge watching experience of this now cult classic TV show at a premium price! For the rest of the world, you would have to watch week by week which became outdated due to the risk of spoilers over water coolers and the internet! Not sure if this is just a phase for watching TV right now or what the future of TV watching will be! I am loving what I'm watching and hope you are too!
With that being said, what are YOUR favorite shows and why? I want to hear from YOU!
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