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Binge-watching and the future of TV

Willa Paskin wrote a really interesting article for Wired about the future of television. The most interesting parts of Netflix Resurrected Arrested Development. Next Up: Television Itself are about the rise of “binge-watching” — the behavior of churning through multiple episodes at a time in one sitting. Netflix found that designing shows to allow for binge-watching is good business:

The more that ­people binge-watch, the more attached they become to the show. “Binge-watching is a behavior that really started for us back in the DVD days. The way ­people were returning the discs, they weren’t watching one a night or one a week,” Sarandos says. “As we got into the streaming business, it became more trackable. What we saw was that the ­people who did this were much more attached to the shows. And because they were more attached to the shows, they reported more value in watching them on Netflix.” In other words, the more you binge, the better for Netflix.

This is why Netflix released all 13 episodes of House of Cards at once, and why those who say it was a stupid decision will likely be proven wrong.