This was published 7 years ago
Netflix is studying our television binge-watching habits
By John Koblin
At a time when there's more scripted television than ever, how long does it take to finish a complete season of a show?
According to Netflix, not much time at all.
Subscribers who finish the first season of a TV show generally wrap it up in a week, Netflix says. And those viewers are dedicating a significant part of their time to do it: They watch about two hours a day.
These are some of the findings from a study Netflix released this week after tracking its global base of subscribers and how they watched the first seasons of more than 100 television series over a recent seven-month stretch.
"After three years of studying original series releases and nine years of streaming overall, we can now identify some patterns, finally," Cindy Holland, the vice president for original content at Netflix, said in an interview.
"We've gotten past, 'The binge watch, it happens!' Now we're trying to distinguish that different series are consumed at different rates," Holland said.
Using median figures, the findings show that some shows are consumed quickly, while others are viewed at a slightly slower clip. The stuff viewers lap up? Horror and thrillers. The shows that take them slightly longer? Political dramas and sophisticated comedies.
Here are some of the trends Netflix identified among first-season viewers in the United States (please note, not all shows are available on Netflix in Australia):
The Very Fast Binger
How quick: The median amount of time for a user to finish a season is four days. Time spent watching each day is about 2 hours and 30 minutes.
Genre types: Horror, thrillers, sci-fi
Examples:
- Breaking Bad (available on Stan in Australia)
- Sons of Anarchy (available on Presto)
- The Fall (available on Stan)
- The Walking Dead (pictured, available on Foxtel)
- American Horror Story
- Orphan Black
Holland said these kinds of shows "were truly propulsive, straight-up genre stuff. These are the ones that people push through much faster and not necessarily have to think about the issues or unpack all the jokes or take a break from the big drama moment."
The Fairly Quick Binger
How quick: The median amount of time users take to finish a season is five days. Time spent watching each day is about 2 hours 10 minutes.
Genre types: Dramatic comedies, crime dramas, superhero shows
Examples:
- Fargo (available on Stan)
- The Blacklist
- Orange Is the New Black (pictured)
- Nurse Jackie (available on Stan)
- Marvel's Jessica Jones
The Slightly More Relaxed Binger
How quick: The median amount of time to finish a season is six days. Time spent watching each day is about 1 hour 45 minutes.
Genre types: Political dramas, irreverent comedies, historical dramas
Examples:
- Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
- Arrested Development
- House of Cards (pictured)
- Homeland
- The West Wing -
- Mad Men
When jokes from a show like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, are being fired at a machine-gun rate, people tend to take more time between episodes to digest them, Holland said. And the company found that with political dramas like House of Cards and The West Wing, viewers tend to "take a breath," she said.
Netflix's study included current shows (Fargo) and those off the air for some time (The West Wing). The streaming service studied only serialised shows and programs that were globally available on the service (Netflix has more than 81 million users). The study covered viewing habits between October 2015 and the beginning of May. Subscribers who did not finish the first season of a show were not included.
While Netflix contends that the binge model is what viewers want, some traditional network and cable executives continue to argue that their week-to-week rollout of original programming keeps their shows in the cultural conversations for months at a time.
But Holland said the study proved to the company that, yes, Netflix viewers were binge-inclined, and reinforced the company's faith in its policy of releasing all the episodes of an original series at once.
And because the study is based on rookie seasons, what happens after?
"The general trend we noticed is that subsequent seasons are consumed even faster than the preceding seasons," Holland said.
* Fairfax Media, publisher of this website, is a part owner of streaming television service Stan.
The New York Times