Decision Overload and the Rise of Video on Demand
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Image via a now-deleted Reddit userThe Before Times
It's sometime in the mid to early 2000s. You and your friends cram onto an aging couch in a poorly lit basement in an attempt to escape the scorching heat of the summer. One of you fishes a remote out from between the cushions.
As you cycle aimlessly from channel to channel one of your friends suggests something called On Demand.
You press your remote's dedicated Video On Demand button and are presented with the pinnacle of graphic design and the most meager of titles. You choose one at random as you are tired of scrolling through a sea of channels that are somehow all on commercial break. Excluding the single paragraph blurb presented during selection, none of you know what you're about to watch. None of you have a smart phone and the idea of walking over to a computer to research the selections available seems like an absurd use of time.
You and your friends have never heard the word "streaming" before.
By the time the decade closed out, most young Americans would have some notion of streaming video through services like Netflix and Hulu. It would still be years before Netflix Originals like Hemlock Grove or Orange is the New Black would make an appearance.
In these early days, streaming services – or "Video On Demand" as most American's had come to know this type of service from their cable set-top remotes – offered a new layer to the media landscape. While still far too immature to truly replace cable or satellite TV, streaming services leaned hard into a concept completely foreign to consumers at the time – choice.
No longer were you beholden to the scheduling and programming of Big Media. You were free to go about your day and catch up on your favorite shows on your time, not the other way around. You would finally be free from the fear of missing the climactic finale of the show you and all of your coworkers were talking about.
The supplantation of traditional media had begun.
With the digitization of over-the-air broadcasts – and the failure of most American's to make that transition (good-bye bunny-ears) – the choice of entertainment became less about what shows to watch and more about which services to subscribe to. Sure, cable and satellite weren't going anywhere, but to be in-the-know on the latest media trends meant to be caught up on Breaking Bad.
As the volume of titles grew, so did market fragmentation, and no longer were consumers safe to assume their favorite title would be on Netflix. These changes in the landscape, however, rolled out gradually – gradually enough that we kept up dutifully. No longer were our heads filled with the airing schedule of Lost, instead being occupied by which platform had Futurama now.
This brings us to today. Streaming services now collectively have over a billion users globally, with Netflix alone making up roughly 25% of that number. At our fingertips is a massive catalog of over 800,000 unique titles in the US alone.
Why Too Much Choice Might be the Wrong Choice
It's important to clarify that having choice is great. Not just from the perspective of owning your time in a way that traditional cable didn't allow for, but an argument could be made that media choice has given rise to a more diverse range of content and representation, with production companies incentivized to create the broadest landscape of options instead of focusing solely on the least common denominator. Giving this up in exchange for a return to cable or over-the-air programming is clearly a step in the wrong direction, but the hyper-consumption of videos from a dozen or so streaming platforms creates a different kind of problem: decision fatigue.
This is a real, medically researched phenomenon that you've likely heard referenced in casual conversation sometime in the last decade, even if just in the form of dubious facts about Albert Einstein wearing the same outfit every day as a way to focus on more important things.
In our modern, highly connected life, the problem of decision fatigue isn't limited to media consumption; rather, it is the harbinger of a broader cultural shift. We, as people, are busy. Our time is valuable. Our money is finite. Each choice impacts the way we spend those resources. For many of us, we care about what we watch in much the same way we care about the clothes we wear. Our choice in what we watch signals to those we interact with what is important to us, what we find interesting, and what we can collectively discuss around the water cooler. Imagine being the one Cricket fan in a crowd of Hockey aficionados.
It's a decision that we have to make every time we turn on the television and start browsing for a respite from the woes of the day. It's a decision that is entirely unavoidable if you want to watch anything. Your streaming services will recommend content, but the days of turning on your TV and being immediately greeted with whatever channel it was last tuned to are gone.
"It's one small decision – how hard could it be?"
It's true. For most people, this is maybe just a small decision and one made with ease. Perhaps you're the sort of person who has a rotation of shows and a system that keeps your choices focused. It feels manageable to the point where you don't spend any time thinking about it. But how much work does it take to get there?
If you're the sort of person that stops to look up reviews for a product while standing in the aisle of a real-life, brick-and-mortar store then you already understand what I'm talking about. It's not just the choice, it's about making the best choice. With the internet at our beck and call it's hard to avoid the temptation of taking just a few moments to research the choices in front of us. Maybe it's to compare prices, maybe it's to check reviews, or maybe it's to find the New York Times' list of must watch shows of the decade so you can narrow down how you're going to spend your weekend. This is effort. This is energy. This is time spent making a selection that wasn't part of our daily lives fifteen years ago. This is a problem compounded further by the ready abundance of choices in what we eat, what we buy, or where we go on holiday – all of which can be researched and arranged endlessly from the comfort of wherever we and our phones are. Life isn't a simple list of curations, it's an onslaught of constant, globally-sourceable options and a cacophony of influences shouting over each other that they have the best choice out there.
So, What Now?
Maybe none of this is news to you, and you've spent every sleepless night thinking about this exact problem. So what do we do?
Going back to the pre-internet era is obviously not an option (unless you're doing a bit for Youtube).
Replacing streaming services with physical media is a fun novelty, but doesn't really do much to cut down on daily decision making.For some small break from the cycle, consume more consciously. Resist the temptation to skip intros, get comfortable sitting through end credits, and turn off autoplay. Each video consumed should feel fulfilling in a way that binging just can't, and in doing so, will likely slow your consumption down significantly. The less media you plow through the less often you have to ask yourself, "so, what's next?"
It goes without saying, but the easiest way to cut down on the number of decisions having to be made is by cutting down on the number of options available. If you're the sort of person subscribed to Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, HBO Max, Apple TV, Starz, and Youtube Premium then it might be time to cancel all but one or two. Your wallet will probably be happier, too.
Most importantly, simply being aware that you're having to make so many decisions is an important step. Build routines around it. This could be meal planning and/or prepping, picking out outfits for the week, and deciding on the rotation of what you're currently watching. Spending time once a week making decisions for the entire week is far less taxing than making a thousand small decisions throughout the week. Have a fallback for when you are too burned out – a go-to outfit, a reliable take-out joint, or a good book you want to finish reading. Avoid the fallacy that platforms like TikTok or "doom scrolling" are the solution to decision fatigue – they come with their own mental health costs.
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@jeffmower Incredible, and somehow both shocking and not at all surprising.
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I will say that I remember spending a great deal of time scanning every title on every shelf at Blockbuster searching for something to rent for the weekend. Similarly, how long would you spend scrolling through every available channel not really settling on anything, maybe half paying attention to something you didn't really want to watch, and then start the cycle over again during a commercial break?
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My sense is that there is a central fallacy to the attractive idea that we can somehow optimize our time. In "Empire Records" Liv Tyler's character notes, "My dad always said that there's 24 usable hours in every day." This is obviously untrue and yet we all feel pressure to eek out as much usability out of any given stretch of time as possible.
My sense is that we as a species have always had time to fill and probably often felt bad about time "wasted." It isn't true that all time has the same value. When people say time spent doing X activity is wasted that carries the assumption that the same unit of time could/should be spent doing something more valuable. But if I cut down on my tv watching does that mean I will necessarily spend that unit of time improving myself? Or will I "waste" my time in a new and different way? -
Erica and I have a saying: "There is no One True pillow." This came about as Erica likes to "research" even the most trivial purchase as you described above. Even once she has seemingly narrowed down her choice to one she will then research even more.
Of course there isn't the One True anything. There might be some better options but there almost never is an absolute best option. -
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@jeffmower Oh, I like this. The idea that I couldn't possibly read every book tortured me as a kid, but I've come to realize that most of those books aren't for me, anyway. I would rather sit with a small collection of books representing a diverse range of ideas than mindlessly consume thousands of works just to say I did. That being said, I've watched over 40 seasons of Survivor, now, so everything has its purpose.
