Do you suffer from video streaming paralysis? You’re not alone.
It happened to me again last night. My wife and the dog went up to bed early, leaving the TV in my custody. But after cycling through Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Paramount, and Tubi, I couldn’t find anything I wanted to watch. So I gave up and read a book for a couple of hours.
This kind of paralysis is apparently super-common. Nielsen, the American company that measures TV ratings, says that it’s a real problem. I quote from Music Ally’s report: “In just three short years, the amount of content available to TV viewers has grown by more than 1.1 million individual programs…20% [of TV viewers] say they don’t know what to watch beforehand and couldn’t find something to watch — so they did something else instead.”
Nielsen also says that it’s typical for someone to spend 10-and-a-half minutes searching for something good on TV. That’s up by three minutes since 2019.
And then there’s this: Those who stream video for entertainment are spending a lot of time with classic TV shows. Another quote: “60% of time spent streaming in May 2023 was dedicated to programming that first aired on linear channels. That’s up 5.2% from October 2022.” Examples given were Grey’s Anatomy and Gilmore Girls. This is just like we see with music streaming where people are spending more and more time with older music than anything contemporary.
I totally get that, too. I’ve been working my way through the Doctor in the House series from the UK which aired starting in 1969.
Read the report here.
