The Binge Release
On 1 February 2013, thirteen episodes arrived on the same day: House of Cards. In its announcement Netflix wrote that releasing a whole season at once hands over to viewers, completely, the choice of when and how to watch. The broadcast timetable disappeared that day.
Though as usual, whatever is called first has something before it (see the myth correction below).
What is interesting is that it was the makers who were unsure. When a show from Norway was released all at once, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos said it was just like working on an album. Steven Van Zandt, who was in it, responded: you labour and suffer, and someone can watch a year of your work in one night? That sounds a little weird. For the people who made it, a change in delivery was also a change in the sense of time.
And this invention holds up the band before it. The dramas of the age of the antihero carried the weakness that you could not join partway: a story that does not reset makes no sense unless you watch from the first episode. The full-season release and catch-up streaming erased that weakness. The long story of a person changing became viable as a business because it became possible to rewind.
This band is also a story about numbers. For a long time, streaming did not publish viewing figures, because the party doing the measuring had moved from outside research firms to the streaming companies themselves. The turning point was Squid Game — 142 million in four weeks from release. But that figure is not hours viewed. It is the number of households (accounts) that played at least two minutes. And in the shareholder letter for that same quarter, Netflix had said it would switch to reporting by hours viewed within the year. That famous number, in other words, belongs to the last generation measured by the old ruler.
In November 2021 a weekly top ten by hours viewed began to be published, and in December 2023 a half-yearly report started (covering over 18,000 titles and roughly 100 billion hours). The numbers are coming back. But the units keep changing. In Japan the measuring company shifted its index from households to individuals; in the world at large the measuring party itself was replaced — at the same time, on both sides of the planet, the way of counting was moving.
The myth, corrected
House of Cards was Netflix's first original series, and the first to be released all at once
The series Netflix itself calls "our very first original series" is Lilyhammer, from 6 February 2012 — and all eight of its episodes went up on the same day. So both the first original and the first binge release came earlier. What House of Cards did first was to be the first large original Netflix commissioned outright, and the first time an all-at-once release was made the headline of the strategy. Whatever is called first usually has something before it.