Episode 6: How Industries Can Use This
Based on this information, the industries that create these shows can create episodes and seasons that are more apt for binge watching, allowing them to reach today's consumers who have turned binge watching into a norm and a common culture. Since these people are binge watching as their main form of consuming television, creating shows meant to be binged will help draw them into the show.
Almost every show that I got as a response to asking what shows people binge watch has some kind of story line throughout, even if the individual episodes could stand alone. Things like game shows, DIY shows, or anything that does not follow a consistent plot are much less likely to be binge watched (although a few people did say that they binge House Hunters). Adding a narrative to shows to be followed across multiple episodes could help that show to be more binge friendly. For instance, following people on a longer house hunt across multiple episodes or having people on a game show for long periods of time and finding out more about their life might help to play into the binge culture and get the binge watchers to watch the show.
Furthermore, shows that have cliffhangers seem to be popularly binge watched. This could mean that the industry should add more cliffhangers and/or more suspenseful endings to each episode, drawing people back into the show. More radically, however, shows could stop having cliffhanger endings and instead bleed seamlessly from one episode to the other. This could go as far as an episode ending in the middle of a conversation, action scene, or even sentence and picking up right where it left off in the next episode without even a blink. This might cause bingers to not even consciously pay attention to when they are moving from one episode to the next, allowing for fully fluid shows.
While Netflix seems to build its shows around binge watching, there are some complaints about long episodes and long seasons. I wonder if this is going to lend itself to shortening of episodes. I think the industry might try to combat these complaints by creating episodes even shorter than typical TV episodes, then stringing those together in a way that is meant to be watched in rapid succession. For example, the series Bravest Warriors is made up of several 5 minute episodes. They can be watched one at a time or one after another to follow the whole story. The episodes have been put together as a full compilation of YouTube, allowing viewers to easily watch the entire series. This seems to have been a successful model for Bravest Warriors, and one that other TV creators might try to follow in the future.
It also makes sense to me that television networks will continue to put entire seasons of their shows online for binge watching and that the practice will grow in popularity. With the rising popularity of streaming sites like Netflix, networks need to keep innovating in order to keep viewers on their platforms instead of subscription streaming sites. Allowing people who love binging on the subscription sites to stream on network sites as soon as the season is released can help draw people to these networks, which keeps the networks earning money.