Is streaming’s binge-watching era officially over?

Stranger Things isn’t over yet, but the series’s two-part release this summer may signal the beginning of the end for one benefit of watching Netflix shows.

The streaming service changed entertainment forever in 2013 when it dropped all 13 episodes of political drama House of Cards’s first season at once. Since then, it’s been a proponent of letting its users binge entire seasons of its originals, even as other entertainment companies have begun to implement weekly releases like on old-fashioned TV.

But times have changed. Netflix released international hit Money Heist in two parts last fall, and dropped the fourth and final season of crime drama Ozark in two parts early this year. Ditto for Stranger Things, which was released in two batches over the span of five weeks. This fall, Netflix will do it again with the fourth and final season of Manifest.

By some metrics, it’s paying off. Money Heist drove considerable viewership in September and December, when each part was released. Ozark spent at least 18 weeks attracting more than a billion viewing minutes, according to Nielsen. And Season 4 of Stranger Things became the most-watched English-language series in the service’s history, with all four seasons among the top ten English-language titles on the service for at least seven weeks straight, according to the company’s tracker of top titles.

Viewership doesn’t always mean subscriber growth, which Netflix is hard-pressed to prove to investors. But if fans want to see how their favorite shows wrap up, they’ve had to stay subscribed for months. That could make all the difference for a service looking to keep consumer churn down and erect scaffolding for an ad-supported tier.

“When you stretch things out, when you string things along, you keep people engaged, and you keep them coming back and you de-risk the possibility of a binge followed by a cold-turkey quit,” explained Eric Schmitt, research director and analyst at Gartner.

Canceled out

Industry-wide, stretching out a show over multiple weeks is commonplace to help bring viewers back, with Disney+, HBO Max, and Paramount+ opting primarily to release new episodes week by week, like they would on linear television. Disney+ even made a strategic effort to try to own at least one night of TV viewing by releasing new episodes of its originals on Wednesdays.

It’s easy to understand why. Spread out a popular new series over several weeks and months, and you de-incentivize someone from canceling in the first place. But the move also helps serve advertisers, who want to reach audiences reliably over a span of several weeks, not all at once.

“Advertisers like pacing,” Schmitt told Marketing Brew. “Very few advertisers want to hit someone with a message 10 times in 10 hours.”

Advertisers have developed some ad formats to monetize all-at-once-viewing on their platforms, including the binge-ad format on services like Hulu and Peacock. But since ad-supported media thrives on more viewing (which creates more inventory) and more consistent viewing (which creates better inventory), streamers have to pay attention to how much subscribers watch, as well as how predictably they watch, explained Dave Morgan, CEO and founder of TV advertising platform Simulmedia.

“Particularly with ad-supported [streaming], it’s all about viewership,” Morgan told Marketing Brew.

Binge, please

Viewers, though, slightly prefer when episodes are released all at once. Just two years ago, Netflix co-CEO and chief content officer Ted Sarandos told investors that subscribers “really like the all-in-one model” and that the company would stick with it. In April, though, Sarandos changed course, saying fans liked a batched release, especially if they had been waiting a long time between seasons.

And according to a December 2021 consumer survey from Forrester, just over half of US online adults who use streaming services said they prefer when an entire season of a TV show is dropped at once instead of week-by-week.

But that’s too bad, especially as Netflix looks to court advertisers with a compelling offering. Viewers may just have to get used to batch releases more often.

“The stranger thing would be if Netflix tried to force ad sales into a binge-watching model,” Schmitt said. “That would be upside down.”