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Cultural Effects
The rise of Netflix has affected the way audiences watch televised content. Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product officer, believes that Netflix is a model for what television will look like in 2025. He points out that because the Internet allows users the freedom to watch shows at their own pace, an episode doesn't need cliffhangers to tease the audience to keep tuning in week after week, because they can just binge straight into the next episode. Netflix has allowed content creators to deviate from traditional formats that force 30 minute or 60 minute time-slots once a week, which it claims gives them an advantage over networks. Their model provides a platform that allows varying run times per episode based on a storyline, eliminates the need for a week to week recap, and doesn’t have a fixed notion of what constitutes a “season”. This flexibility also allows Netflix to nurture a show until it finds its audience, unlike traditional networks which will quickly cancel a show if it's unable to maintain steady ratings.

Netflix has strayed from the traditional necessary production of a pilot episode in order to establish the characters and create arbitrary cliffhangers to prove to the network that the concept of the show will be successful. Kevin Spacey spoke at the Edinburgh International Television Festival about how the new Netflix model was effective for the production of House of Cards; “Netflix was the only company that said, ‘We believe in you. We’ve run our data, and it tells us our audience would watch this series.” Though traditional networks are unwilling to risk millions of dollars on shows without first seeing a pilot, Spacey points out that in 2012, 113 pilots were made, 35 of those were chosen to go to air, 13 of those were renewed, and most of those are gone now. The total cost of this is somewhere between $300-$400 million dollars, which makes Netflix’s deal for House of Cards extremely cost effective. Netflix's subscription fee also eliminates the need for commercials, so they are free from needing to appease advertisers to fund their original content.

The Netflix model has also affected viewers’ expectations. According to a 2013 Nielsen survey, more than 60% of Americans admit to binge-watching shows and nearly 8/10 Americans have used technology to watch their favorite shows on their own schedule. Netflix has successfully continued to release their original content by making the whole season available at once, proving that viewer habits have changed. Audiences no longer want to watch just one episode a week at a specific scheduled time; they want the freedom and control over when to watch the next episode at their own pace. Netflix has capitalized on these habits by automatically playing the next episode in the series, knowing that 15 seconds isn’t long enough for viewers to decide to stop watching; by the time the next episode starts they are already hooked.