That's been the case with books before Netflix too...

To be fair, the quantity and availability of novels/fictions was pretty low before the fifties, so I guess there is some truth to it... Though the timeframe is definitely longer then only Netflix's existence

With books you have to actually read. It’s an active thing. Vegging out on the couch or bed even, is passive. Often you don’t even have to think because it’s mostly action with lots of repetition and little mystery.

You're moving the goalposts. Whether reading is better than watching is an interesting debate unrelated to the topic at hand.

I'd happily veggie out on a couch with a favorite book series and live in fantasyland for days (alas, real world interferes...).

I don’t think so. Of course we can read pulp. Evenso, I doubt people would read as much pulp as they’d watch all you can stream programming.

Given the option of gorging on books or gorging on Netflix over a long weekend dawn till dusk, I bet most people would choose Netflix. If you randomly divided the people into those two groups and made them read and the others watch, more readers would wash out than watchers.

Just wait until VR fulfills its hype.

> You can stream all day and live in fantasyland.

I tried that. It soon becomes utterly boring, no matter how good the show is.

It probably depends on inner will and psychological stage of mind. Do you mind being unproductive and such.

Maybe I'm different. Passive entertainment is dull to me. I don't watch other people play sports, I want to play them myself. Traveling and looking at sights rapidly gets very dull.

Yes, I'd say you're not the "binge watcher". It's a phenomenon.[1] According to some researchers, this is an understudied phenomenon which may have negative correlation with mental health[2]. Of course Netflix would be loath to admit this.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binge-watching

[2]http://www.buffalo.edu/ubnow/stories/2019/04/kruger-binge-wa...

TV has been like that since the advent of cable.

> TV has been like that since the advent of cable.

No, it hasn't. It has been somewhat since the much more recent introduction of “on demand” programming to cable, but that was basically just the introduction of streaming into cable in response to streaming services.

Sorry, I meant once cable rolled around, there's always been something to watch on TV. It may not have been interesting to normal people, but to an addict that's not going to matter. There was also the option of buying or renting a ton of movies or DVDs and watching them one after the other. This honestly reeks of a moral panic to me.

I think "on-demand" is a blessing. We are no longer tied to broadcaster schedules, have to remember to "program the DVR", writers don't have to write a cliffhanger every 12 minutes for an ad break.

That was the case with cable and, before that, radio.