CONVERGINGMEDIACase StudyShifting, Bingeing, and Saturday Mornings

278

When kids woke up on the morning of Saturday, October 4, 2014, for the first time in a half century there was no commercial broadcast network offering Saturday morning cartoons. That was the date the last holdout, the CW, ended its string of Saturday morning cartoons, replacing it with family-oriented but non-animated programs; the other networks had begun phasing out Saturday morning cartoons as early as the 1990s. What is unclear is whether or not any kids noticed the difference (although their parents and grandparents might have felt a pang of nostalgia at the news).¹

So what finally killed off the broadcasters’ weekend morning kid cartoons? There are likely several contributing factors (from cable channels dedicated to cartoons to FCC requirements for more educational programming), but perhaps the most relevant is the ongoing shift in the way audiences consume television programming of all kinds, and the biggest of those changes involve the time shifting and binge watching that come with online video streaming.

Indeed, the end of Saturday morning cartoons will not deny kids the experience of shows like Scooby Doo!, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Transformers. Video streaming has made these titles—and many more—available at any time, rendering programming blocks somewhat obsolete. Although not many comprehensive studies have been done on these viewing patterns, there’s room for some observations. For example, say children in a household watched two hours of cartoons on a Saturday morning in the 1980s. They would likely have seen four different cartoon programs (each with a half-hour time slot) with around a half hour of commercials mixed throughout. Today, if the household has an Internet-based streaming service like Netflix, that same two hours could just as easily start at 6 o’clock on a Thursday night (an example of time shifting) and would include five cartoons, each about twenty minutes long, without commercials. There’s also a good chance that the kids would be watching the same cartoon the whole time if they were binge viewing, which is often defined as watching two or more episodes of a program in one sitting.

This change in what was once a staple of television programming and weekly viewing is just one example of the way the digital world is transforming the way we interact with and consume our entertainment. A 2014 survey found that 50 percent of adults consider themselves binge viewers, and 55 percent of those binge viewers said they did more binge watching in 2014 than they had in 2013. Binge viewing is even more prevalent among college-age adults (18–24), 53 percent of whom said they binge-view on a daily or weekly basis.²

279

Another study commissioned by Netflix had similar results, showing not only that binge viewing is growing in popularity but also that when a season of a popular TV show is released, an increasing number of users will watch the entire season—even twenty-two episodes—within a week. Both studies found that almost two-thirds of those who identified themselves as binge viewers use their mobile phones (or another second screen) while bingeing, and that the use complements their viewing instead of competing with it.³ For that matter, smartphones and tablets have meant that binge watching can happen practically anywhere.

But beyond ushering in the end of Saturday morning cartoons, what are the larger implications when one steps back and considers the combination of on-demand streaming video, time shifting, binge viewing, and engaging social media while watching a program? Answering these questions will likely be a big focus for years to come for networks, production companies, cable companies, and media scholars and researchers. But we do have a few tantalizing clues as to what the future of television entertainment may hold.

On the business side of television and cable, the ability to stream video content has led to a growing trend of cord-cutting—consumers getting rid of cable and watching only content available online (see also the opening of Chapter 1). Premium cable channel HBO, which has long resisted having any of its programs appear in the Netflix lineup, has announced that it was looking into offering its own streaming service. Major media giants like Comcast (which provides Internet and cable services as well as owns NBC and Universal Studios), who want to charge Web sites more for faster Internet connections, are butting heads with net neutrality advocates and companies like Netflix who feel the Comcast proposal of a tiered Internet system amounts to a shakedown (see also the section on net neutrality in Chapter 9, pages 306–307).

On the creative side of the television business, some critics note a positive trend with more high-quality dramatic and comedic television programs, which they see as a welcome change after reality television meant less demand for scripted productions. The surveys mentioned earlier support this idea—that consumers are demanding higher-quality and complex shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men, and will reward those programs with near-fanatical following. It also means quirky programs like Portlandia, which might have struggled to find a big enough audience on a less widespread cable network like IFC, can build a bigger following after episodes become available on Netflix.

The social implications of time-shifted binge viewing will likely be the subject of some debate. Some critics worry that binge watching might lead to loss of productivity or social interaction for students and workers alike, while others feel that the flexibility offered by streaming video (and DVRs) makes it easier to be productive because being a devoted fan of a particular TV program doesn’t mean having to adjust personal schedules to accommodate TV schedules. Still others point out that simultaneous engagement with social media can encourage conversations that might not have happened in years past. Kids won’t get the Saturday morning cartoon blocks their parents experienced, but they may be learning to engage with television more actively than ever before.