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Binge Watching TV Makes It Less Enjoyable, Study Says (vice.com)
According to new research by Jared Hovarth and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne, binging appears to diminish the quality of the television show for the viewer. From a report: This conclusion is based on a self-reported study incorporating 51 graduate and undergraduate students at the university, who were split into groups of 17 to watch a television show at different frequencies. One group watched the one-hour show on a weekly basis, another watched it on a daily basis, and another group consumed the first season of the show in one sitting, amounting to about 6 straight hours of TV. Each group was watching the highly acclaimed first season of the BBC Cold War-era drama The Game. The season consisted of six episodes, and none of the participants had previously seen the show. After finishing the season, all respondents filled out a questionnaire to gauge how well they understood the show. 24 hours later, they returned to the lab to take a retention quiz to see how well they could remember details from the show. As the researchers found, the mode of viewing had a significant effect on the study participants' ability to remember the show. For instance, binge-watchers had the strongest memory performance the day after watching the show, but this retention also had the sharpest decline over 140 days. Weekly viewers on the other hand, showed the weakest memory performance 24 hours after finishing the show, but also demonstrated the least amount of memory dilution over time.
Stuff everyone already knows.
Seriously,
How about a study with people who have jobs, kids and responsibilities and then see who enjoys binge watching vs waiting every week for the next episode.
Most people I know with busy lives actually just wait for the end of a season that plays weekly and then binge watch the whole season on a rainy day.
I know the parameters of the study are well identified in the article, but still, useless study is useless.
Watching TV makes it less enjoyable
Because we will drop the sub after we watch the one show they have we want.
The rest of this study is irrelevant and honestly doesn't ring true. When a show is spread out too long I tend to lose much of the plot points due to other things going on in between. I tend to stop caring about some shows I might otherwise finish up. Possibly the last part of that sentence is the key point: when binge watching I might watch a show I'd ordinarily decide to give up on because it got stupid. When they're spaced a week apart I will just not bother to go back.
Try that across multiple different types of shows: Historical realism, comedy, fantasy, action, etc. Was the show created for broadcast or is it a Netflix original?
This is an interesting finding, but not conclusive of anything yet.
Nope, no sig
Doing anything makes it less enjoyable. You just keep moving on.
Small sample size leads to poor generalization
I haven't been able (or willing) to sit and watch my favorite show every week since I was a kid. Now, granted I don't care that much about TV anymore, but if it wasn't possible to binge watch TV shows, then I wouldn't be watching anything at all.
I just have so many other things going on. I can't imagine actually telling my wife or kids, "my show comes on at 8pm, I need to see this". Actually, I can't imagine even thinking that, let alone behaving that way.
I want to enjoy TV as much as I want to enjoy it, not as much as some marketing company wants me to enjoy it. I'd rather binge, and not feel some desperate need to watch and obsess over the next episode every day of the week. I have work to do, and winter is coming, literally; I'd like to enjoy the outdoors while I can.
Why is everything that isn't a cocaine-like addiction presented as a problem?
This seems pretty obvious. I (occasionally) like bingeing chocolate, but the first chocolate bite is always better than the last. Same with cheeseburgers and porn (no connection there, don't force one in snarky jokes).
Table-ized A.I.
Damn blipverts erase your memory of the show when you bingewatch.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If I don't binge watch some programs, I lose interest. Meaning, if I have to wait a week to see something I'm not that interested in, I'll forget about it.
Example, Star Trek Voyager. I didn't see the whole series until I streamed it - when I was out of work and bored shitless.
When I had a life? Pfft. Not worth it. There are quite a few others like that.
What does retention have to do with enjoyment.
More over these retention numbers are what would be predicted by many other studies on memory that support shorter study periods and frequency as ways of boosting retention.
But I thought binging showed the healthy behavior of well-adjusted college students. . .
Cheese cake, smoked meat or lesbian porn.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
We all lean this as 5 yr olds. Or should. A scoop of ice cream is good fun. A whole tub of it in one sitting is not so fun. Duh. All things in moderation.
This just proves you remember things better if you spend more time thinking about them. The title is irrelevant to the summary.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I would like to see this study re-done with commercials. So they picked a British TV show, presumably with the British style TV (no commercials until the end of the show). Give me an American style show, with 33% or more commercials in an hour and I bet you will get totally different results. This is why streaming and binging are huge in the US, as people can absorb the content, with out the BS Marketing.
I'm sick and tired of watching shows and then they get canceled after 7 episodes, after one and a half season, at the end of a season when the creators didn't have a chance to wrap things up.
This is the reason I binge watch most shows....mainly because I know what I can trust about it.
Binge watching is less enjoyable because it is no longer a "shared" experience with friends and family...but whatever. Having shows canceled underneath me more times than I can count has driven me to this.
There's no shortage of good content. Maybe if you watch a whole season of House of Cards in one sitting, you won't enjoy it as much as if you'd watched it spread out. But since you can immediately find other shows of similar quality to watch, then maximizing your viewing hedonism is done by binging. The limiting factor is just your time and how much of it you want to spend glued to a TV screen. If there is one thing in the world that I have no worries about, it's the entertainment industry's ability to feed us delicious screen candy.
Not sure what they were studying, but if you tied yourself to a chair with rough rope or heavy chains, then watch TV nonstop... you won't enjoy it as much. Repeat this a few times and you also will probably get vein problems in your legs, less muscle mass, higher body fat, weaker lungs, cooties, the uglies and who knows what else. People, for fucks sake stop sitting in front of a TV for a quarter of a day at a time!!!!
3 groups of 17 students each is pretty close to anecdotal.
Not only too much time on their hands to binge watch, but also to do stupid studies about it.
And binge watching porn makes you more tired.
News at 11.
#DeleteFacebook
No commercials and I can watch as many episodes as I feel like which is usually 1 or 2 a night. I get the videos from my local library so there's no cost involved although there is the occasional damaged video. That's pretty rare, however. I did this for all the recent great shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Sopranos, The Wire, and House of Cards. The only problem is that is can take several months to work through all the seasons of a show and watching the same thing for that long gets a bit stale even if the show is a great one. I'm at the start of Season 4 of House of Cards and have reserved searson 5 which is on order now.
In any case, binge watching these programs beats pretty much anything on live today.
no ads, done on my time, no week long annoyances of finding out what happens next only to miss the first half because of a wreck on the highway on the way home from work. oh yeah and netflix finally has a skip intro button. all these things that make binge watching less enjoyable. rofl.
I have a full-time job. I do plop in my chair after work, but that's a max of 3 or 4 hours, and I usually divide that between TV, internet, and futzing around the house. I might finish off 2 one-hour shows, and it's not unusual for me to not finish 1 one-hour show.
Weekends are variable. I might have more time, but I also have plenty to do, especially during good weather. There will probably be crap days this winter when there's nothing better to do than veg out watching the tube, but usually my TV time is limited.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Lol.
What a load of crap. Seriously ! WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED HERE ? That people who are made to watch and remember something over a long period of time are more likely to remember it for a longer time ? THERE IS NO SURPRISE ! Whoever came up with the idea to research this question is a waster of oxygen and water.
You're better off consuming your media in the traditional medium - once a week and loaded with ads.
That binge watching "BBC Cold War-era drama 'The Game'" makes it less enjoyable.
Some shows lend themselves to binge watching more than others. Especially shows that progress the main story arc little from episode to episode.
You have to be kidding. Glad I solved such dumb ass problems years ago by loosing the TV. Try it sometime--you might get your life back.
Reading the TFA (I know, I know, what sort of slashdotter am I?) we find that only people watching multiple episodes at a sitting found the experience "less enjoyable". People who watched one episode each day in a row found it equally enjoyable.
I found waiting for the end of Breaking Bad and watching all 62 episodes over two months (one a day) to be quite enjoyable, and I am certain that I caught certain plot points that spanned seasons (which aired over a five year period) better than I would have with nearly year-long breaks between seasons.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Instant gratification found to be less satisfying.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Researchers discover that people don't really enjoy binge-watching shows that they're forced to watch, especially ones they're not that interested in to begin with.
Honestly, who gave them funding for that?
binge-watchers had the strongest memory performance the day after watching the show, but this retention also had the sharpest decline over 140 days
Why do I care about the nuances of a show after nearly five months? I'll remember the general story and if I enjoyed the show or not. The fact that Jon Snow had a hairless ass when he was banging his aunt won't concern me in January.
Trolling is a art,
I find I recall things better over the whole story arc when I watch a series of episodes in sequence. One hour a week and I get bored and stop watching...or I wait for a half dozen to record on the DVR and then watch.
TV is too much of a pain in the ass anyway with all the commercials. ..and they wonder why people don't want to pay $150/mo for all that interruption..
Steaming Turds like The Defenders make it much less enjoyable. Personally a good series I find far more enjoyable to watch like a movie over a few nights. Shows like Defenders are a waste of a few hours after which time you realise it is shit and don't bother with the remainder of the series.
...as part of a study. Makes it quite irritating. Especially if you didn't have a taste for cold-war dramas to being with.
No, binge watching makes it clear when scriptwriters are stretching 1 hour of story over a span of 6+ episodes.
-Styopa
Study the material (Ideally, without binge-ing: After 25 minutes of study, have a 4 minute break, then a 1 minute recap), then 6 days later, revise the material.
Obviously. Or the subjects were idiots.
Yeah, I'm gonna call BS on their study.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm *definitely* enjoying shows I binge-watch a lot more than shows I watch on a weekly basis. I tend to forget a lot of details if I have to wait a week in-between each show, especially for serial shows, where what happens in episode 1 has consequences in episode 2 (or 10). I get a lot more engrossed into the storyline and characters when I binge-watch.
What I've found also is that if a show turns out to be crap, I'll realize it a lot sooner if I'm binge-watching than if there's a one-week delay between each show. Maybe that's what they found out by "enjoying it less". I call it not putting up with garbage instead - lowering the tolerance threshold. And that's fine by me, there's enough stuff on TV already that you shouldn't spend your time watching bad shows.
When I binge watch a show I actually get into it, when I have to wait a week between shows I barely follow the story and actually tend to forget about it between episodes. Every show has its good and bad episodes, but when you hit a bad one or 2-3 bad ones watching 1 per week you just say "this show turned to garbage" and stop watching, whereas if you're binge watching you just go through it because you know with several dozen others it's bound to get good again.
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This site is no longer interesting it's just another carefully engineered PRODUCT with nothing but CRAP designed to annoy me so I'll post. Oh shit, they won again. Fuckers...
There seems to be a large bias towards binge watching. I think it's related to our society and the culture of impatience and instant gratification. I'd relate binge watching vs pacing a show out to orgasm vs heroin. Heroin gives a constant steady stream of dopamine release, while orgasm gives you this huge spike. So heroin actually feels better. I personally think taking a small dose of pleasure each day is better for our brains, but what do I know lol.