[…] The survey found that 17 percent of binge viewers do so on a daily basis, 63 percent weekly and 90 percent on a monthly basis. Of the respondents, 71 percent said binge viewing is “totally normal,” and 59 percent considered it to be a harmless habit. Frequent binge viewers are more likely to associate positive qualities to binge viewing than …read more […]

When I moved back to the states, I made up for my years of minimal media exposure like a madman. I bought my own tapes, as much as I could afford, whatever interested me, and recorded shows I watched so I could revisit. That sensation of waiting throughout an entire commercial break to hit the "rec" button so the playback would be mostly seamless, that's still with me. The only shows you could get on VHS at the time were anime shows (ridiculously expensive, though a friend let me borrow his so I could get exposed to Evangelion at just the right age), Star Trek (WAY too many tapes to be space or cost effective), or some british shows like Fawlty Towers, Mr Bean, BlackAdder, and Red Dwarf, all of which I snatched up. Since there were only six episodes of a british season, it was my first taste of watching a season the whole way through. When I got into college, I slept all day and took classes in the afternoon and evening (the fact that it was impossible to leave our boring-butt campus in the day helped cement that decision). So I was watching a lot of late-night TV, recorded shows, and a growing DVD collection (this was before Netflix or even Youtube). TV on DVD existed, but mostly for anime, which was still expensive. I had a growing collection of tapes of shows I watched, basically four-hour tapes of a single show, but that was... not a great way to watch stuff. And there wasn't that much, so if I had something, I saw it a LOT. When I left college, I wound up working evening shifts, basically when all the good shows were on, so I started recording them on disc and watching them when I got home. It was fine except it was one episode of some show in crummy quality, with commercials, and if I fell behind on something (say, the Simpsons), I had to swap discs and chapter-search each time I wanted to see the next episode. What a hassle. TV on DVD at this time was a little more common, and I stopped feeling the need to record stuff altogether. The stuff I used to watch all the time started falling by the wayside. A year or so later I found myself working in a video store when TV on DVD was really coming along, and suddenly I had access to... well, not everything, but a much wider selection than before. I had pretty much stopped watching TV at this point since there was nothing on when I wasn't at work. I would rent a disc of a show (usually four episodes of an hour-long or seven episodes of a half-hour show) and could get through the whole thing in one night. Nice quality, no commercials. Much better. Very pleasant. Except, without fail, I would always be in the mood for JUST one more episode. This was also my first experience with HBO shows, since you could rent those alongside network and SOME cable. Years went by and the variety of shows increased as DVD became a viable format. Soon it wasn't just the big, current shows, but the older shows that people haven't seen in ages. The sheer amount meant that now you could rent a WHOLE season at a time instead of just one disc (provided it was an older series). Now we're cooking. I would watch a whole season of a show before switching to watch something else, unless it was a movie that just couldn't wait. It was perfect: no more wondering what to watch. Now you knew, and you had plenty to go through. About this time, Netflix started streaming their titles and I got a subscription (before you call me a turncoat on my store, bear in mind I had a membership to another video store as well because they had a whole slew of titles that my store didn't). Now I could watch what I wanted immediately on my TV thanks to a little box, and anything that didn't go through the box (which turns out was a lot), I could get through the mail. All I had to do was wait. The box wasn't in HD (for me) yet, but there was a wide variety of shows that I didn't get a chance to see before. By this point, the cable TV in my room stopped working all together, and I never bothered to get it fixed, because I never use it. In fact, it's a struggle for me when I go to hotels or my dad's house or anywhere else and just 'watch TV." Every problem I used to have feels exaggerated now, I have to go around the dial two or three times to settle, not choose, but SETTLE on what to watch, it's usually halfway over, the pace is constantly being broken by commercials, and then when the programming switches, I have to start all over again. Not to mention that the aspect ratio (which my DVD player and Roku have been doing instinctively for years) is always different depending on what's on where. Robert Llewellyn does a more concise job of explaining how TV, particularly hotel TV, a broken model than I could, although I wrote up my own account of being foolish enough to travel without my laptop and while that's not directly about binge watching, when I was thinking about it, my mind was saying "I'm not going on another trip without my movies." MY movies. Not the movies I made. MY movies. My iTunes movies and my Netflix account. MINE. There's an intimate connection there that doesn't exist with flipping through the TV. For all these people who are binge-watching so much, I wonder: how much actual TV are they watching? How much of it is live? Do they DVR it? Back when I was young, I was constantly seeing what was on. Now, you can just hit a button and save it for later. You don't have to turn the TV on until you're ready to just sit down and watch it. I think I watch more TV in less amount of time than I used to, because I'm not wasting time flipping channels or waiting for something to come on, or sitting through commercials for stuff I'm not going to buy anyways. Binge watching has given me the freedom to turn the TV off. Anything worth seeing will make its' way to me one way or another, through streaming or Blu-Ray (I became an HD snob) or clips on Youtube. Instead of having to "settle" through a hundred channels of muck, now I can be patient and have top quality shows competing for my attention, and the dreck I never used to watch anyway just disappears into the background.