In August this year, Love Between Fairy and Devil (Cang Lan Jue), an oriental mystery costume drama, dominated the front pages of many Chinese social media platforms, generating buzz across the Chinese internet and becoming a phenomenal drama. It also has an 8.5 rating on IMBd. The series was then released on Netflix, and 36 episodes were released at once. Many young people who like to watch soap operas began to binge-watch this series, many of whom watched the series in just three days and had common conversations with many of their unfamiliar friends and even netizens because of the series. A survey on Netflix defines Binge-watching as viewers watching 2-3 episodes in a row at once (Jenner, 2014), while this can only be used as a reference, as in reality, audiences watch more episodes than this amount in one go. In this case, it is worth noting that Binge-viewing has had an impact on viewers, playing platforms, and filmmakers, as analyzed below.

For Audiences, Binge-watching is a social tool for viewers to keep up to date with current culture and content and to have something to talk about with others. Secondly, in modern times, people are usually very busy and mentally stressed, so binging a television in their leisure time can relieve the stress of everyday life. However, it is important to note that excessive Binge-watching can be addictive and affect the viewer’s physical and mental health (Kaufman, 2021).

Binge-watching has also changed the way audiences consume films and TV today. Many TV shows or movies are exclusive to a platform, so in order to be able to binge-watch users often need to sign up and pay for a membership on these platforms to see the full content, plus they can subscribe to personalized content for themselves through their own viewing preferences. This adds a new form of revenue for AV broadcasters. Netflix, for example, converted its library of 10,000 titles from DVD rentals to online viewing in 2007 and required groups of customers to register for a personal account and password and pay for a subscription in order to have unlimited access to the content on demand and to watch it (Jenner, 2014). Many other audiovisual platforms such as Amazon Prime, HBO and Disney+ are now using a similar model and it is argued that these new audiovisual operators are slowly disrupting the hegemony of the traditional audiovisual and television industry and creating a new digital business model by operating as streaming media, allowing users to have highly customizable and on-demand content and watch it anywhere, anytime (Martínez-Sánchez et al., 2021).

Edit By: Yuxia Shen(33738765)

References:

Jenner, M. (2014) “Is this TVIV? on Netflix, TVIII and binge-watching,” New Media & Society, 18(2), pp. 257–273. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814541523.

Kaufman, M. (2021) The surprising health benefits of binge-watching, Mashable. Mashable. Available at: https://mashable.com/article/binge-watching-health-effects (Accessed: November 26, 2022).

Martínez-Sánchez, M.E., Nicolas-Sans, R. and Bustos Díaz, J. (2021) “Analysis of the social media strategy of audio-visual otts in Spain: The case study of netflix, HBO and Amazon prime during the implementation of disney +,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 173, p. 121178. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2021.121178.