Let Them Binge!

When a new season of that TV serial you like comes just once a week, isn’t it frustrating? You want to see the next episode, but it’s 7 days away, and by then, you lose the flow…

That is why Netflix, the company that streams movies to your device, tried an interesting experiment: they released the entire season of its original programming serial all at once.

Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, pointed out that the same thing happened 200 years back, with, hold your breath, books! Back then, fiction was written for magazines, one chapter per issue. But once it became economically viable to print books, you got all the chapters at one shot! Hastings feels TV content is headed the same way: the “serialized release model” may be nearing its end.

Another advantage Hastings sees with the new model is, again, what happened with books: variable sized chunks. After all, chapters in a book are of variable size, so why can’t episode lengths in the new system, “depending on the natural rhythms of the story”?

Besides, isn’t the customer always right? Actor Kevin Spacey, who starred in the Netflix release-at-one-go series, House of Cards, certainly thinks so:
“Clearly, the success of the Netflix model -- releasing the entire season of House of Cards at once has proved one thing -- the audience wants the control. They want freedom. If they want to binge -- as they've been doing on House of Cards -- then we should let them binge.”

Is this going to be the new format of entertainment?

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