Netflix invented binge-watching. Now it may have outgrown it. | TechCrunch

Must have been a very long weekend considering Lost runs in at about 120 hours.......

For me it was a hard drive full of DS9 rips passed around the CS department.

That's correct. House of Cards was the first. First Netflix original, first full season by season release. It was a bizarre concept at the time.

That's irrelevant though. You could watch entire seasons of TV shows and series of movies once they were all out on VHS, DVD, or Blu-Ray as box sets.

Lost. Walking Dead. Possibly Breaking Bad.

Binging just means to consume large amounts of something. I guess it means to consume new TV shows, specifically, nowadays. In which case, I'm just an old man yelling at clouds and I'm sorry.

Even on regular television binge watching was possible. CSI, Law&Order, General Hospital, Days of our lives..... And many more would do marathons all the time.

You know Netflix streaming came out in 2007, right?

When they did it by mail, dvds were already a thing, Netflix just mailed them. But rental stores already existed.

Loads of people years before Netflix bought DVD-RW drives and just ripped everything they could get their hands on, then dupe their own to trade for what they didn't have. Netflix did drastically increase people's libraries tho. They had a huge disc collection and it didn't matter what order you got them in.

You gotta remember VHS duping was already a thing, cassette tapes before that, and even bootleg 8 tracks before all that

The Internet didn't invent piracy, it just meant people didn't need to leave their house to do it

That said, certain types of storytelling work better with one model versus the other. If you just chop a 7-hour movie into ten parts, many of the episodes will end in spots that are anticlimactic, if they make any sense at all. This leaves the audience with a bad taste in their mouths that they stew over all week. Those are better binged until the viewer chooses to take a break.

On the flip side, some shows will have a repeating rhythm to the structure that starts to feel monotonous if you just watch them back to back to back. Of course you can’t control how people engage once everything’s out, but ever was it thus in the era of home media, and when done well the original audience will be there to advocate for the show.

If nothing else, showrunners should be told which way the original release will be done during the writing process.