New Study Finds 71% of People Prioritize Watching TV Over Sleep
Glad to see we’re not the only ones.
A new study has found that 71% of people will prioritize watching TV over going to bed on time, with 14% saying they’ll finish an entire season of a TV show they’re enjoying before going to bed.
The survey of over 1,100 Americans found that the majority of respondents, no matter what age or gender, generally prefers entertainment to sleep.
It’s important to note that there has been a tidal shift in the ways we watch TV and movies over the past 10 years, with digital streaming becoming a common subscription in almost every home these days. Services like Netflix make it easier than ever to binge ten episodes of a TV show without even really noticing the last four hours have been spent watching television.
As someone who watched Breaking Bad on Netflix, if the show had aired a decade earlier, we would all have been stuck waiting week-to-week to watch the latest episode, and catching up would be nearly impossible. But now with a service like Netflix offering the entire series, someone with enough dedication and free time could sit and watch the entire show in 2 days and 14 hours (thanks CNET for doing the math).
The advent of auto-playing basically means we don’t have to move, and seeing as most of our favorite shows are now on-demand, there is no traditional television schedule limiting the amount of episodes of a TV show we can watch. We can’t tell you how many times we have sat in front of the TV while episodes automatically start playing. While people have complained about this feature for years (why? we have no idea), it certainly encourages a continued viewing session for many people who probably think, “eh, why not, one more episode sounds good.”
A quote from Reed Hastings in 2017 makes it obvious how aware of this the company is.
“You get a show or a movie you’re really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep,” The CEO said.
A fair and accurate assessment of the streaming giant’s market position, certainly.