Get Ready to Purge Your TV Binging

I recently started Lower Tech Bills, a business that examines Cell, Internet and Television bills for no charge. For a free look at your household’s bills, visit www.lowertechbills.com or email hmwellsradio@gmail.com. I do a lot of research on trends in those industries and each one continues to change so quickly that it’s hard for anyone without a lot of free time to keep up. Since I retired from Radio, I like to tell people that they may not have the time to do all that research, but I do. Plus, I truly enjoy following those industries and finding ways to save consumers money.

In the case of TV, the advent of streaming video has fundamentally changed the way that we watch television. In the days of “linear TV” (all of us viewing the same shows on the same day at the same time each week), we made an appointment to watch our favorite shows. If we loved “Hill Street Blues”, during most of its run, we all set aside Thursday night at 9pm (Central) and got ready to watch the adventures of one of the finest ensemble casts ever assembled. Then on Friday morning, the watercooler would come alive as we’d all get to work and talk about what went on during the previous night’s episode. It was a collective experience that was part of the magic of watching a great drama with comedic moments - remember Sgt. Belker the biter?

All of this began to change with the invention of the home VCR. Suddenly, we not only could record TV shows for later viewing, but we could also take a trip to our local Blockbuster store and purchase box sets of “Hill Street Blues” on home video. Thus, you could now watch as many episodes as you wanted to at one time, whenever you wanted. But, what to name the process of sitting on one’s couch for hours on end, watching different episodes of the same show? Fear not because people who get paid good money to do ridiculous research created a roadmap for that answer. It seems that the word, “binge” dates all the way back to 1854 where Anne Elizabeth Baker's Glossary of Northamptonshire Words and Phrases says:

“BINGE. This word primarily signifies the act of soaking, and is applied substantively to persons, and adjectively and verbally to things. A man goes to the alehouse to get a good binge, or to binge himself.”

By the time Albert Barrère and Charles Godfrey Leland published their Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant in 1897, it was no longer just a provincial expression. They stated, “Binge, a big drinking bout”. By the twentieth century (The Oxford English Dictionary recorded binge-drinker in 1946), “binge” had crossed the Atlantic and was being used to describe alcoholic overindulgence on our side of the pond as well. Then in 1959, psychiatrist and researcher Albert Stunkard wrote about binge-eating in his paper titled “Eating Patterns and Obesity.” Thus, the term, “binge-eating” was born.

It was only a matter of time before the word, “binge” became synonymous with over-doing just about anything. The earliest example that I could find for the term, “binge-watching” comes from a 1996 New England Usenet discussion among fans of "The X-Files." One fan asked for videotapes of the show by writing, “We've just become hooked on the X-Files, so I'm a little behind. Does anyone by any chance have tapes of this show back to season one they'd be willing to lend me so I can effectively catch up? Actually there are three of us who all got hooked at the same time, so I'd predict that there'd be some MASSIVE binge watching right away!”

These days, binge-watching is such a part of the cultural landscape that it’s difficult to remember that it’s a relatively new phenomenon. In fact, the term achieved the Collins English Dictionary Word of the Year status as recently as 2015. Collins itself defines binge-watching as “to watch a large number of television programs (especially all the shows from one series) in succession.” Let’s face it. binge-watching is a terrific way to either catch-up on an older series or to spend a weekend, watching the latest series that just dropped its entire season.

The pandemic really led to what I would call the “golden age” of binge-watching. We all had plenty of in-home time to finally watch a series that all our friends and family had been hounding us about for years. During the pandemic, I was able to binge-watch all the episodes of older shows like “The Wire” and "Breaking Bad" as well as new seasons of shows such as “Ozark”. What a wonderful way to dump your mask, grab a bottle of wine or (now that it’s legal), head to the dispensary and spend some quality time with your TV set. We truly live in remarkable times!

However, just as binge-eating will eventually lead to human gastrointestinal issues, in Netflix’s case, it got a bad case of corporate heartburn of the P&L statement. Suddenly, Netflix’s shareholders began saying that while orange might be the new black, red ink is surely not the new black ink. That became abundantly clear on April 20th of 2020 when in a single day, Netflix lost 35% of its market value. Now that’s a spicy meatball! It seemed that Netflix was forking-out almost 12 billion dollars a year on content and program development. Their subscriber base was simply not big enough to cover those costs. Since they were facing stiff competition from other streaming services like HBO, Prime and Hulu, they could not cut programming costs. So guess who had to pay the toll on the road to profitability? You guessed it – us. Recently, Netflix came-up with four ways to potentially raise those tolls. They include:

1. Increasing prices – An oldie but a goodie. When I first started subscribing to Netflix in 2014, it cost $7.99 a month. In 2023 that price has literally doubled.

2. Accepting Advertising. From its beginning, Netflix said it would not air ads. That recently changed when they added a lower-priced ad-supported subscription tier.

3. Putting a lid on screen-sharing. In a separate blog post, I write about Netflix’s (and other streaming services) plans to make it much harder to allow friends and family members to share login credentials. If you want to share your username and password with Cousin Vinny, that’s gonna cost you.

4. Stopping the practice of dropping all the episodes of new programs on the same day. Thus, ending the ability to binge-watch entire seasons of new or hit shows.

To be clear, not all streaming services embrace the concept of dropping all new shows at the same time. For example, Disney+ doesn’t do that. They adhere to the old-school one episode per week approach. Some companies like Hulu embrace a hybrid model where they might drop two new episodes of “Handmaid’s Tale” on the first day of its new season. Then, they go back to releasing just a single new episode each week thereafter. This is sort of the “drip, drip” approach. But the Founder and Chairman of Netflix, Reed Hastings, has always embraced the idea of having all the episodes of new shows or new seasons drop at the same time. Until now (see point 4 above).

Perhaps it was an unsustainable business plan. Consumers, being no fools, would often take advantage of free trial offers or one-month subscriptions and play the game of how many episodes of “Stranger Things” can I watch before my trial ends or my eyeballs turn inside my head? But numbers don’t lie and if we do a little math, we’ll see how binging hurts Netflix.

Let’s say that you want to watch a show that has thirteen episodes. If they all drop at once, you could take a one-month standard subscription, pay $15.49, binge-watch all thirteen episodes within that month and cancel your subscription. Now, let’s say that same show only releases one program per week. At that rate, you’ll need a three-month subscription and pay $46.47. Now multiply that by all the other Netflix subscribers who want to watch those thirteen episodes and that comes out to...A lot of money! And yes, you could wait until week fourteen when all the episodes will be available and then subscribe to Netflix for a month. But you’ll have to be constantly on spoiler alert patrol. There’s nothing like your soon-to-be ex-friend telling you how Ozark ended when you’re still watching week six.

Does this spell the death of binge-watching? Absolutely not. One of the true joys of TV viewing is the rediscovery of an older show that, for whatever reason, you missed during its heyday. As I mentioned above, the pandemic allowed me to catch-up on some amazing shows that I simply missed when they were new. In addition, box sets of classic shows will still be available, assuming that you can find a store that still sells video. Note to self, the last Blockbuster store is located in Bend Oregon at 211 NE Revere Avenue. I wonder if they would take back my rental of “The Big Lebowski”? I mean how much could I really owe in late fees from 1998?

As long as streaming services and a certain video rental store in Oregon continue to make entire seasons of older shows available, binge-watching will not go away. On the other hand, I think it’s only a matter of time before binging new shows or new seasons of current shows goes back to the way of how we dine – one course at a time. So, enjoy the video buffet while you still can.