THE NETFLIX DECADE: HOW ONE COMPANY CHANGED THE WAY WE WATCH TV

SHANGHAI: In the not-sodistant past, TV viewers were forced to wait a week for the next installment of their favorite shows, parceled out by networks in half-hour or hour-long increments.

Fast forward to 2019, when media and tech companies are subverting that schedule and the majority of viewers using US TV streaming services watch an average of four hours of content in one sitting, according to

Deloitte.

At the start of the decade, binge watching involved VHS tapes, DVD box sets or long nights glued to a DVR. TV cable hits included “Homeland” and “The Wire” - hourlong dramas with complicated plot lines that needed to be watched sequentially. Watching “Saturday Night Live” on a Sunday became normal, and viewers started to lose track of the broadcast schedule. Around the same time that the broadcast TV schedule was losing its hold on viewers, Netflix was beginning to invest in original content.

In 2011, it struck a deal for its first original show, the political thriller “House of Cards.” It released all 13 episodes of the show’s first season in Februray 2013. That July it followed with the entire first season of “Orange is the New Black.”

Viewers were hooked, and the cultural shift accelerated. “Binge-watch” was a runner-up to “selfie” for the Oxford Dictionary’s 2013 word of the year.

Netflix championed this new kind of consumption, commissioning a survey to determine how many people binge-watch, and why. “Our viewing data shows that the majority of streamers would actually prefer to have a whole season of a show available to watch at their own pace,” said Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos at the time.