You Are Not Alone: TV Binge Watching Is the Norm

Binge eating, binge drinking and now, binge watching. No more cut-to-the-chase for us, no sirree.  

How I Met Your Mother, Breaking Bad, whatever your television obsession may be,  you increasingly want to watch all of it in one sitting. Now. And, setting the hearts of marketers pitter-pattering around the globe, you would even be inclined to pay extra to be afforded the opportunity to do so.

What is this all about?

Well, some of it is entitlement: we have come to expect that we can get what we want when we want it. Technology and affluence have combined to lead us to this belief. Another factor is demands on our time. We no longer come home at 5:30 to find our slippers, pipe and dinner waiting. When we have a time slot to watch, we watch. And watch. Because we are not sure when the opportunity may reappear. A final factor may be that technology has given us the ability to concentrate on what we like, to the exclusion of all that extraneous stuff. Remember when we had to buy an album and listen to all that boring hoo-hah to get to the one tune we loved? We no longer tolerate that in any of the content we seek.

This may or may not be sustainable. The revenue model is still in development. But the demand is umistakable. JL

Janko Roettgers reports in GigaOm:

70 percent of all U.S. TV viewers love to binge watch, and a notable chunk of them would actually pay more if they had access to a whole season.

Still think American TV audiences don’t like to binge? Think again: Seven out of ten U.S. TV viewers consider themselves binge viewers, according to a study released this week by Miner & Co. 63 percent of those binge viewers burn through TV show episodes in one sitting at least once a week, while 17 percent even do so every day.
I know what you’re thinking: who has the time? Well, students for one, as the survey also shows that binge viewers are a lot younger than your traditional TV audience. But we also know that Americans do watch around five hours of TV every day on average, which is a lot of time for a few episodes of your favorite half-hour show.
But even if you wanted to take the number of binge viewers with a grain of salt, it’s still great to get some insights into their thinking. 61 percent of binge viewers think that the ability to binge has made TV more enjoyable, and 20 percent would be willing to pay more if they could burn through an entire season of their favorite show at their own pace, as opposed to having to wait a week until the next episode airs.