Opinion: Netflix's fidelity to its binge model needs to change

A Netflix sign is photographed outside its office building in Los Angeles. Photo / AP

OPINION:

You have to remember that Netflix started life as a mail-order DVD rental service to understand why binge-watching is at the core of its ethos.

When DVD box sets took off in the early 2000s, viewing behaviour changed. You can watch your favourite shows for hours and hours, no longer beholden to commercial TV schedules or poor-quality VHS selections.

Netflix was right in the mix to understand that many TV fans wanted to immerse themselves in a show, without waiting a week for the next drop.

As Netflix moved into streaming and launched its own original series, it would do something new, it would make every episode available all at once and let the viewer decide how and at what pace they wanted to watch it.

It was revolutionary and it worked for Netflix for many years, especially when it was clearly the most dominant force in original streaming series.

For its early series such as House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, they benefited from the novelty of the approach and claimed the lion's share of the cultural conversation.

Robin Wright stars in House Of Cards Season 6. Photo / Netflix

Nine years on, it's a very different streaming world and what made Netflix distinct then may be the thing that's holding it back now. The binge model has gone from its secret weapon to a curse.

When Netflix reported a loss of 200,000 subscribers, its stock price plummeted, wiping tens of billions of dollars off its market value. The era of unfettered growth was over, and the recriminations began.

Was it the increased competition from the likes of Disney and Amazon? Was it the 100 million accounts that let others mooch off their password? Was it the TV shows and movies themselves, are they not as good anymore?

It's a combination of all of it. Some of Netflix's most talked about shows are ones that started years ago – Stranger Things, Ozark and The Crown. It needs newer hits.

Netflix has already been tagged with the quality versus quantity debate for some time as its focus widened to expand beyond the prestigious shows that kicked off its original programming. For every season of Sex Education there's another instalment of Too Hot To Handle.

Netflix wants to be everything to everyone to try and capture as much of the market as possible. Every taste profile must be catered for. As it filled its originals library with more titles an individual viewer wasn't interested in than was, what made its shows buzzy became diluted.

And with dozens of new titles every month on Netflix fighting for relevance and attention against the dozens more premiering on Disney+, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, AMC+, Stan, Binge, Foxtel and others, it's no wonder that it feels like there's "nothing to watch" on Netflix.

It's the buzz that matters and buzz is harder to attain especially when even the biggest and loudest shows seem to be a flash in the pan moment.

The competitors in Netflix's survival horror series Squid Game. Photo / Supplied

Take Squid Game. It was undoubtedly a phenomenon. Netflix members streamed 1.65 billion hours that the Korean series in the first four weeks after release. For a while there, it seemed as if everyone was talking about Squid Game.

But while people were talking about how good it was, generating excellent word-of-mouth, and where you can buy dalgona candy or Squid Game-inspired Halloween costumes, what people weren't talking about, relatively, were the story or the characters.

Yes, it's a spoiler-laden show and most people are half-decent humans so there is a natural reluctance to discuss the minutiae of the plot, but the binge model isn't conducive to that communal experience.

You couldn't discuss spoilers because most people were not at the same point as you.

Compare that to something like Game of Thrones, which spawned an industry around speculation, fan theories and more as viewers obsessively combed through every detail to try and figure out what was coming next.

Now that's a culture Stranger Things could've easily tapped into if all the answers weren't as accessible as pressing "play next episode". Instead, Stranger Things will pick up one wave of fan theories about what the next season has in store, instead of weeks of the same.

Netflix's insistence on the binge model means it's missing out on staying in the zeitgeist, it's missing out on the old water cooler effect. And it's something its rivals are doing.

When Disney launched its streaming service, it decided to drop things weekly. So that means people talking about The Mandalorian for 10 weeks. It means chatter about Loki for six weeks. Or Only Murders in the Building for 10 weeks.

Apple follows a similar plan. It drops two or three episodes in the first week to hook viewers in and then doles them out week-to-week, which means eight weeks after Severance premiered, people were still talking about it.

An advertisement for Netflix's popular show Bridgerton is seen outside its office building in Los Angeles. Photo / AP

HBO series The White Lotus and Mare of Easttown found considerably more buzz and fans as the weeks went on.

And many of the American streamers such as HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock are spin-offs from broadcast and cable networks, so they're still married to the weekly model too, even for their streaming-only titles.

The weekly release gives a show time to build momentum through word-of-mouth. The binge model had its pros too, especially in its early days, but it's a lot harder to immediately break through when there is now so much competition including from within Netflix.

If it isn't an immediate hit, great shows end up lost in the chaos and are cancelled after one season. Squid Game was huge, but even that conversation had petered out within the month when viewers had finished the show and moved on.

It's not that Netflix should abandon its binge model, it's that it should consider abandoning its fidelity to it.

Amazon Prime Video uses a mix of both. It releases some shows weekly and some all at once – and we're assuming they have lots of data to back up those decisions.

And we know Netflix can walk away from decisions that were once set in stone. Last week, it flagged its intention in introducing a cheaper ad-supported subscription tier, an option that was previously unthinkable.

Could nixing its insistence on the binge model be next? If it wants its more of its shows to capture the zeitgeist for longer, to build passionate fan bases that spends every week obsessing over every new episode, it should.