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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not only that, the headline misleadingly uses the word "enjoy", but the study clearly looked at memory/understanding of the show, not enjoyment. So all they REALLY showed was that memories created during a 6 hour binge are not as lasting as those created over multiple exposures. In fact, what this study shows is more relevant to learning than to anything to do with enjoyment of tv shows. If you have a critical test the next day, binge learning is possible and will hold well for 24 hours... but if you need to actually remember the material at a time after the test, you need to constantly review the material.
If we MUST know how this study applies to TV shows, then what we learn is that binge watching a "season" of an annually released show will make it harder to follow the subsequent season because you've forgotten a lot. But that's what "Previously on [this show]..." recaps are for... and it would be helpful to study how well people did on these tests when shown a recap like that.
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