When Netflix first set about upending the way we consume media over a decade ago, it was hard to envision what our TV future might look like. While there’s still hope for groundbreaking innovation, the analysts who predicted that the streaming industry would peak in a bloated era of mundane streaming offerings before eventually consolidating and reviving the cable bundle seem to have been proven right.

But if the “golden age” of streaming is really behind us, and “Just OK TV is here to stay,” then why isn’t the experience of watching our shows more stable? Somehow, it feels like our streaming choices are more chaotic and disarrayed than ever.

It’s not just that we now live in a world with a seemingly infinite number of shows and products to consume, spread across hundreds of streaming platforms that no one person could ever regularly access. We also have less consistency in how this content gets served to us. Episodes of new series frequently drop in different increments and cadences, not only from platform to platform, but also within the same platforms. 

Even though 72 percent of US consumers regularly binge-watch shows, the lure of binge-watching has faded. In an era when there’s so much new media being released all the time, even the thought of streaming a limited series of six to eight episodes can feel like an uphill battle. Plus, far too often — perhaps because the overall quality of the content we’re consuming is decreasing — our experience of that media fades the moment the end credits roll. Additionally, streaming platforms are increasingly backing away from this model toward more livestreamed content. That means that just when the culture has trained itself to binge, our brains are being pulled in still more directions, toward still more viewing options.

Why do TV rollouts feel so frenetic yet so difficult to sustain, and binged media so digestible yet forgettable? 

Is there any way out of this morass?

Over the previous decade, Netflix forced an enormous cultural shift in the way we consume media by committing to personalized binge viewing. Between the rise of algorithmic curation for individual viewers, the end of regularly scheduled “appointment TV” viewership, and the onslaught of diversified streaming options, the monoculture died a quick death. Gone was the era when media was consolidated and tens of millions of people mostly consumed the same limited range of content, mostly all at the same time. The streaming era promised more choice, more content tailored to individual tastes, and an endless amount of content to consume, whenever and however you wanted it.

Yet increasingly, streaming platforms are changing up that loose structure. Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and many other streamers have increasingly moved away from the binge-watch model toward a mixed-release system in which some series might drop all at once while others drop sequentially, and others a few episodes at a time. Amazon Prime and Apple TV+ typically drop a few episodes at the beginning to hook viewers and then release succeeding episodes individually or in small batches, week by week. 

Even Netflix has increasingly sought to vary its release schedules and foster a collective communal viewing experience. Its recent seasons of The Crown and Bridgerton have been split into halves, with the release of each half a month apart. Reality hit Love Is Blind gets a similar treatment, with the show dropping multiple episodes at once, but spread out over several weeks. While the streamer has experimented before with intermittent releases, May saw the platform take a bold step forward in live streaming, devoting a full week to several live comedy releases, timed to coincide with its in-person comedy convention. The live offerings included a roast of Tom Brady, a Katt Williams comedy special, and a full week of John Mulaney hosting a comedy talk show, airing nightly during what we once thought of as “prime time.”

Each of these releases offer a chance for audiences to experience something of the dying (if not dead) monoculture of the past. The live viewing experience also affords audiences an opportunity to experience the event in real time, usually by reacting to it on social media (as opposed to the traditional next-day “water cooler” conversation). Netflix reportedly plans on investing even more heavily in live content, with two NFL games airing live on the platform this Christmas, and more to follow in 2025.

Of course, that means yet more difficulty for fans in figuring out when, where, and how to watch: Analytics firm MarketWatch reported that the NFL’s upcoming season has been spread around so thoroughly among a mix of traditional, streaming, and hybrid platforms and services that the cost for a die-hard fan to watch every game as it airs would total a staggering $1,600/year. That’s just the subscription costs to access games across 11 different services, on top of the user’s monthly internet bill. 

Is this pursuit of livestreaming really worth it to Netflix and the other streamers? Yes — for a number of complicated reasons that don’t have all that much to do with the content itself.

According to an expansive 2023 fourth-quarter streaming report from analytics firm Samba, streaming audiences say they want more live content from streamers. However, a huge segment of streaming audiences still love a good binge. Not only do 72 percent of audiences regularly binge-watch, but 45 percent binge an entire show within the first five days of its release. According to the report, “68 percent of U.S. adults identify themselves as binge-watchers.” Shows released in bulk had higher rates of retention. Shows that had a periodic release schedule that featured multiple episodes released at the premiere also did well; the highest-ranked show with a staggered release, Netflix’s Depp v. Heard, saw 67 percent of viewers finish the full series.

That statistic explains why a platform like Netflix depends so heavily on constantly serving viewers new content; if they don’t watch an entire show in the first week, they’re less likely to go back to it. That constant onslaught of new content may explain why there’s so much cultural pressure to consume a new series so quickly: Netflix serves you so much new content because you inhale the new content, but you inhale the new content because Netflix is serving you so much of it.

Dizzy yet? Samba also reported that “churn” and “subscription cycling” — the amount of turnover as audiences subscribe briefly to a platform, then move on to another similar platform — both increased last year. Just as popular licensed titles constantly move around from platform to platform, so, too, do consumers hop from one platform to another. With so much licensed content moving around so often, the biggest weapon platforms have to get audiences to return to them and not the other platform is, you guessed it, a buzzy new original release. 

But the buzz only lasts so long, and it’s difficult to get audiences to stick around once they’ve binged their one show the first week it’s out. Variety’s market research arm, VIP+, found that in 2022, the year streaming content reached its peak with over a thousand total original series, the vast majority of those series went unwatched. In fact, on every streaming platform but one, just 20 seasons — not shows, seasons — made up over 80 percent of the total time viewers spent watching original series. 

When you add all that up, it’s easy to see why streaming platforms might be varying their rollouts to the degree that they are. For example, since Netflix split Bridgerton’s third season into two parts, all of the viewers who gave the series a whopping 45 million views will be more likely to stay subscribed to the platform for another month — until part two drops in June, at least. 

There’s methodology behind this strategy. Market research firm Parrot Analytics studied streaming viewership habits based on different kinds of rollouts in the first quarter of 2023 and found that media released week by week gained far more viewing hours than binge-release media. This grouping includes bingeable older shows like Friends and Suits which were originally released on network TV but have since enjoyed revived interest on streaming platforms. Not only that, but shows that were released in binge format had a much, much higher drop-off in demand after the initial viewing period than shows designed for linear release. 

Still, there’s no magic formula for which kind of rollout will attract and keep the most viewers. Samba noted in its analysis that people who can binge shows are more likely to finish them, whereas Parrot pointed out that shows with episodic releases tend to be longer series with more episodes than binge releases, which helps boost their appeal. Think of this week-by-week format as being suitable for people who might want mindless background noise, something they don’t have to pay much attention to or be pressured to finish, rather than an intense marathon viewing session.

Brandon Katz, who conducted Parrot’s market research and wrote the analysis, told me in a phone interview that his thinking about which rollout is “better” changed as a result. “When I was digging into the data and analysis, I realized that there are pros and cons to each strategy and there shouldn’t necessarily be a one-size-fits-all approach to entertainment,” he said. “It should be more on a case-by-case basis, what the specific goals of the streamer are, what kind of TV show it is.”

Katz pointed out that a streaming platform can benefit from varying its release structure, even over a single TV show. “We can use binge to elicit hyper bursts of significant engagement and sell new concepts to audiences once they’re established and successful,” he said. “We can then string it out over multiple weeks to keep them on the hook.” 

He observed that platforms will sometimes use the binge-release structure to generate enthusiasm for a new show that audiences are unfamiliar with, then switch to an episodic release to keep that momentum. When Peacock did this for its reality show The Traitors, the payoff was huge: the second season became the platform’s most-viewed unscripted series to date.

“It’s a little bit harder to earn that audience buy-in when they’re not familiar with the property,” Katz said. “So you see examples in which streamers are trying to piece together the right strategy for the right show, and sometimes it takes a little bit of trial and error.” He pointed out that for Netflix, shows that gained unprecedented success through word of mouth, like Squid Game and Baby Reindeer, proved the importance of binge releases for their model. “Those are new-to-screen concepts that audiences aren’t familiar with … Had they gone week to week, I think there is an argument to be made that they wouldn’t have become the massive successes that they eventually did.”

Genre also arguably plays a role; it’s no coincidence that both of those shows are thrillers with a touch of dark comedy. Dramas and thrillers are among the most-streamed and most-binged shows; in Parrot’s analysis of shows from the first quarter of 2023, fully 50 percent of all binge-released shows in the top 100 were dramas. Another 33 percent were children’s programming. Epic fantasies like The Mandalorian and House of the Dragon do well when they can build audience excitement from week to week. Comedies likewise tend to do their best in serial format and falter when they’re released through binge rollouts.

Yet none of this variety fully explains how daunting all of these choices can feel. I asked Katz: Why is it all so overwhelming? Do we even have the space to properly process content anymore?

“It’s definitely a massive volume of content,” Katz answered. “Netflix flooded the market strategically in order to build up market share rapidly in a very competitive landscape, in order to [earn] validation from an industry that was skeptical of original streaming content. But Netflix’s rate of new premieres is also declining as they rein in spending and they want to stabilize.” He pointed out that this deluge of content finally peaked in 2022 and has since decreased; streamers including Netflix have been cutting back on volume in response to industry contractions. So even though things may still seem chaotic, the streaming melee has slowly begun to subside.

Don’t think, however, that any of this means the streaming landscape will consolidate its rollout options, even while the streamers themselves continue to consolidate. Though it’s tempting to believe that the move toward a consolidated hybrid system, i.e., cable-style bundling, will lead to more rollout structure, Katz predicts we’ll end up with still more structural chaos in which we’ll see a return to more traditional options, but platforms will continue to experiment. He also predicts we’ll see more simulcasting between streaming platforms and legacy networks, and an expansion of the hybrid approach. 

Katz was positive about the future, even while acknowledging it’s overwhelming. “I still think the convenience of streaming and allowing you to watch things when you want, it’s still pretty good,” he assured me. Yet the trade-off for that convenience may be our sense of community and connection. After all, what good is it to consume content when there’s no group of people to excitedly gossip about it with afterward, because you’re all on different platforms, or at different points in staggered releases?

It seems as though the era of hybrid rollouts is here to stay. But this proliferation of choice ultimately all seems to add up to less, not more.