charge them 8 or 8 a month you’ll land and expand You’ll grow and grow and grow said Jim Cramer host of CNBC’s Mad Money The more Netflix knows about what people love what you love the more it can scale that love into subscribers 6 A MAJOR SUCCESS STORY In the 2010s Netflix made some important decisions that paid off and ultimately transformed the company’s business model The first major success story happened as the result of a risky venture On February 1 2013 Netflix released House of Cards a remake of a 1990 British political drama The new adaptation was about fictional US Congressman Frank Underwood a Democrat from South Carolina’s 5th congressional district But Netflix didn’t just release one episode at a time week by week as is typical for a prime-time series Instead the company put the entire first season of 13 episodes online at once for viewers to watch as they wished At first some consumers were skeptical Would anyone really watch all the episodes in one sitting And what about spoilers How could you prevent your friends from talking about what happened in episode five if you were only on episode two Some members of the media 8
Some Netflix customers watch the company’s programming while doing other activities such as knitting weren’t entirely sold on the idea either They searched for ways to report on an entire season of television without knowing if all their readers had caught up For its part Netflix wasn’t worried Our viewing data shows that the majority of streamers would actually prefer to have a whole season of a show available to watch at their own pace said Ted Sarandos chief content officer of Netflix in 2013 Netflix has pioneered audience choice in programming and has helped free consumers from the limitations of linear television Our own original series are created for multi-episodic viewing lining up the content with new norms of viewer control for the first time 7 9
DOES BINGE-WATCHING BREED ANXIETY Many people immediately jumped on board the binge-watching bandwagon when House of Cards was released in 2013 But the new trend did bring up some worry especially with members of the media When media critic Richard Lawson was assigned to review the series his experience was extreme but not atypical I started on episode six and seven hours later there I was blinking my salty eyes and dying for more Lawson wrote in his review The fear really was that I’d be left behind if I didn’t finish That of course everyone else would watch the whole thing by the start of the work week and I wouldn’t have anything to contribute 8 It turns out as Netflix executives expected the gamble was worth it The release of House of Cards the highly successful Orange Is the New Black and cult-favorite Arrested Development boosted the popularity of a phenomenon called binge-watching In the past people used VHS or DVD box sets or cable TV reruns to watch old or previously released episodes of a TV show in a single sitting But with Netflix viewers could watch multiple episodes of a brand-new television program in rapid succession By December 2013 Netflix had the numbers to prove its experiment was a success In a survey of nearly 1,500 viewers conducted on behalf of Netflix after the release of House of Cards 61 percent of the group admitted to binge-watching content The study further reported that 10
nearly 73 percent of TV streamers said they had positive feelings towards binge streaming 9 I found that binge watching has really taken off due to a perfect storm of better TV our current economic climate and the digital explosion of the last few years said Grant McCracken a cultural anthropologist who contributed to the study But this TV watcher is different the couch potato has awoken And now that services like Netflix have given consumers control over their TV viewing they have declared a new way to watch 10 A COMPLICATED HISTORY By prompting the rise of binge-watching Netflix changed the way people all BINGING THE NEW NORMAL With the release of House of Cards the itch to binge-watch took the world by storm But it wasn’t just a one-time compulsion the phenomenon kept going In June 2016 Netflix introduced The Binge Scale which placed shows on a sliding scale The types of shows viewers prefer to savor slowly were on one end of the spectrum and the types they love to devour all at once were on the other First Netflix studied the viewing of more than 100 serialized TV series across more than 190 countries Then it placed each on the spectrum in terms of the qualities that made the show either habit-forming or something that might inspire calm delayed viewing On the slow thought-provoking end were shows like comedies BoJack Horseman and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Those that were most likely to inspire steady viewing were thrillers such as Breaking Bad Dexter and Sons of Anarchy 11
