Five kinds of TV viewer – which one are you? How streaming changed the way we watch series
- The distracted viewer, the FOMO rewinder, the late-to-the-party viewer, the multitasker, the sneaky work watcher – we all consume shows differently nowadays
- Gone are the days when you’d sit in front of the television for your weekly dose of Friends and Seinfeld, or hope to catch a rerun if you missed it
Having to watch a show when it airs? How adorably quaint.
With the rise of streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Crunchyroll, Shudder, Nano and Mubi, our options are so endless that you probably cannot guess which of those isn’t real.
Gone are the days the family would gather on couches in front of the tube on a Thursday night to catch prime-time shows such as Friends and Seinfeld, hoping they did not miss anything because they’d be forced to ask a colleague the next day about what happened or wait for a rerun.
Now, we watch “television” on our cellphones. We stream movies on computer screens and through video-game consoles. We invite people over to Netflix and chill, and that has nothing to do with watching TV.
Technological advances naturally breed changes in our behaviour. As a result, the way we watch these shows has altered drastically – and not just in terms of medium. With this much power, bizarre habits emerge. Maybe you need closed captioning to follow a plot line, or perhaps you like to fast-forward through any scene with people jogging. Those are things you can do now!