Binge-watching

Binge-watching (also called binge-viewing) is the practice of watching entertainment or informational content for a prolonged time span, usually a single television show.

Binge-watching overlaps with marathon viewing which places more emphasis on stamina and less on self-indulgence. In a survey conducted by Netflix in February 2014, 73% of people define binge-watching as "watching between 2–6 episodes of the same TV show in one sitting". Some researchers have argued that binge-watching should be defined based on the context and the actual content of the TV show. Others suggested that what is normally called binge-watching in fact refers to more than one type of TV viewing experience. They proposed that the notion of binge-watching should be expanded to include both the prolonged sit (watching 3 or more episodes in a row, in one sitting) and the accelerated consumption of an entire season (or seasons) of a show, one episode at a time, over several days.

Binge-watching as an observed cultural phenomenon has become popular with the rise of video streaming services in the 2006–2007 time frame, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu through which the viewer can watch television shows and movies on-demand. For example, 61% of the Netflix survey participants said they binge-watch regularly. Recent research based on video-on-demand data from major US video streaming providers shows that over 64% of the customers binged-watched once during a year.

The first uses of "binge" in reference to television appeared in Variety under the byline of TV industry reporter George Rosen, in 1948, according to archival research by media scholar Emil Steiner. The term "TV binge" first appeared in a U.S. newspaper on July 27, 1952, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Sports editor Ed Danforth used the term to describe a Bob Hope–Bing Crosby telethon to raise money for the U.S. Olympic team. While the term "TV marathon" was used frequently in the 1950s, "TV binge" rarely appeared in English language periodicals from 1952-1986 and was most commonly used as a side effect of technological improvements in broadcast television around multi-game sporting events such as the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament, the Olympics, and the World Cup.^{[citation needed]} An October 1970 Vogue trendspotting feature described how people were talking about "the television binge of sports with more networks finding live action healthier than canned plots."

Japanese manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump, founded in 1968, developed a successful formula of publishing individual manga chapters and then compiling them into separate standalone tankōbon volumes that could be "binged" all at once. This Jump formula produced major Japanese pop culture hits such as Dragon Ball (1984 debut), One Piece (1997 debut) and Naruto (1999 debut). According to Matt Alt of The New Yorker, "Jump presaged the way the world consumes streaming entertainment today."

The practice of binge-watching was previously called marathon-watching. Early examples of this practice include marathon viewing sessions of imported Japanese anime shows on VHS tapes in anime fandom communities during the late 1970s to 1980s, and Nickelodeon's Nick at Nite which broadcast multiple episodes from Donna Reed and Route 66 in July 1985.

The first printed usage of the term "binge viewing" appeared in a December 1986 Philadelphia Inquirer last-minute Christmas list by TV Critic Andy Wickstrom who suggested Scotch tape to mend worn VCR tape if "you're a confirmed weekday time-shifter, saving up the soap operas for weekend binge viewing." This first use of "binge viewing" as a gerund predated "binge-watching" uses by nearly a decade. The first known usage of binge-watching as an active verb is credited to GregSerl, an X-Files Usenet newsgroup commenter. On December 20, 1998, he posted a mock questionnaire that asked X-Files fans "Do you ever binge watch (marathon)? Despite that usage, Steiner argues that "binge viewing" is a far closer synonym to binge-watching than marathon.

The usage of the word "binge-watching" was popularized with the advent of on-demand viewing and online streaming. In 2013, the word burst into mainstream use to describe the Netflix practice of releasing seasons of its original programs simultaneously, as opposed to the industry standard model of releasing episodes on a weekly basis.