The death of binge-watching

On the face of it, Wikipedia’s list of the key events of 1 February, 2013 seems impressively comprehensive, ranging from Hillary Clinton’s resignation as Secretary of State to a hurling player denying he’d won €10.6 million in the Irish lottery. What’s missing, though, is something that’s surely had a bigger impact on our daily — and nightly — lives than any of Wikipedia’s choices. On that day Netflix released its first original series, House of Cards, the same way it had released its earlier bought-in repeats: by making all the episodes available at once.

Now that we know how successful both the show and the format proved, it’s easy to forget how risky this was, especially for a $100 million production. According to Netflix’s CEO Ted Sarandos, ‘the one thing that everybody agreed on in this town was that it was insane’. But when House of Cards was followed, just as triumphantly, by Orange is the New Black a few months later, a new age of TV binge-watching was firmly in place.