Netflix to move away from binge model?

Netflix continues to fight to compete in a tough streaming market. In July, they announced they had lost nearly 1 million subscribers thanks to a big push from competitors like Disney+ and Amazon, and earlier this year, Netflix announced a new tiered service that would serve ads to the lower paying tier. While they still have some of the top performing content out there with titles like Stranger Things, Cobra Kai, Squid Game, and Ozark to name a few, their still in an ongoing fight to retain streamers.

A challenge that is as old as time for any business looking to capture your attention is how to keep your attention the longest. Businesses want to keep you in their store longer, radio wants you to listen longer at a time, and streaming services want to keep your subscription dollars longer than their competitors. Creating appointment tuning becomes habit forming, and retains fans. It’s for this reason that Netflix is looking into dropping their famous binge model for a more old school way of thinking and releasing episodes of popular titles on a weekly basis.

They have sort of been testing this for a few months now, not a weekly model, but delaying episodes by breaking series into parts. Stranger Things and Ozark are two examples of splitting a season into parts to retain subscribers. Many comments we’ve seen on this topic on social have been in support of a weekly release model saying it prevents spoilers for those who are behind or don’t have the time to binge a show on its release weekend in a couple days.

We wonder how long until these amazing Saturday morning cartoon bumpers return … remember “after these messages, we’ll be right back”? That song sticks with you.

Crave has used the weekly release model to some success, often taking programming to its site from commercial TV stations with series like Picard and Handmaid’s Tale.

We can’t wait until Netflix moves to a model that requires us to leave the house, visit a location where we get a membership to get pick out a movie on a Friday night while we hope it’s still in stock… kind of sounds familiar. We hope there are good snack in the checkout aisle.

How many streaming services do you belong to? Have you cut the cord on cable yet? Jump into the conversation with us on social media.