From compulsive channel surfing to endless scrolling: 15 years of media change... up to a point

BarcelonaAnalyzing the last fifteen years from the perspective of media consumption means confronting a rapidly accelerating shift in eras, where the landscape of 2010 bears no resemblance to that of 2025. And yet, although the landscape is unrecognizable, some trends have persisted, albeit with a new twist.

The most evident change affects television. Fifteen years ago, it was the dominant medium, with the highest penetration and the most viewing hours across the entire population. Currently, however, it is a medium used primarily by those over 65. Below that threshold, depending on a specific broadcast time to watch content is simply an anachronism.

The figures speak for themselves. In 2010, Catalans consumed an average of 4 hours and 2 minutes of television daily (a calculation that excludes children under four). In Barlovento's latest report—based on complete 2024 data—the figure had fallen to just 2 hours and 36 minutes of linear television. In short, 35.5% of television consumption has vanished. But that doesn't mean, of course, that it has disappeared: like matter and energy—which are neither created nor destroyed but transformed—audiovisual viewing has also mutated and now takes place largely on other platforms.

And if there's one name that embodies this perhaps fatal blow to television, it's Netflix. In fifteen years, it has established itself as the leading streaming platform. But if we go back to 2010—and that date isn't so long ago—we'll find a company that had begun experimenting with online video streaming, but whose main business—more than 80%—was sending DVDs by mail to its more than 16 million American subscribers.

The big change wouldn't come until 2013, when Netflix released what was, until then, its most ambitious series: House of Cards. Filmed with prestigious names in Hollywood—produced by David Fincher and starring a Kevin Spacey who hadn't yet fallen from grace—it boasted a generous budget of $8 million per episode and chronicled the rise of an unscrupulous politician in his criminal race to the White House. This series arrived on the platform with a groundbreaking format: no more waiting a week for each new episode, as traditional television audiences were accustomed to. All thirteen episodes of the first season were released suddenly for viewers to binge-watch at their leisure, each at their own pace.

Thus was born the binge-watching or binge-watching series. And, as the company explained, it was a successful strategy: 85% of its subscribers had devoured the entire first season in just fifteen days, instead of the three months that would have been expected with a weekly viewing schedule. This policy, of course, required intensive production to keep feeding the machine of compulsive consumption. The company's global expansion allowed it to buy local productions and turn them into international hits. From the Danish Borgen in the Korean The squid gameThe streaming audience has become far more immersed in global audiovisual content than under the previous regime, which was dominated almost exclusively by the Anglophone market.

The algorithm takes over

But the most profound change introduced by Netflix isn't the release system, but a fundamental touchstone, as discreet as it is powerful: the company began dedicating significant effort to collecting and analyzing user consumption data in order to make personalized recommendations. Its algorithms decided which series were shown to whom, and also whether it was worth investing in one script or another, based on variables that could be parameterized. Its differentiating factor wasn't the content itself—the major television networks also had that—but the intelligent use of data to tailor the offering in an almost personalized way.

The model has been so successful that it has become generic: a Catalan Netflix, an art-house Netflix... It is estimated that there are now more than 200 platforms worldwide with the ambition to be global. And their combined budget dedicated to content acquisition reaches 248 billion euros. But some look at these eleven zeros with a touch of suspicion and wonder to what extent we are not facing yet another bubble. Some platforms are struggling to turn a profit, but they continue to burn through resources because they aspire to earn a decent position in this battle for market share in what is still an early stage.

Or perhaps not so much. Symptoms of a hangover are already being felt. Disney+ will invest 30% less in 2025 than in 2022. And the production of scripted series has fallen by 25% in the last three years. This notion that the golden age of television series has peaked has led streaming platforms to take a stroll—the world turns and returns to the Born district—in which they are betting on classic television formats (game shows, reality shows...) or on buying sports rights, a safe bet that continues to hold true.

Bruce Springsteen sang about 57 Channels (And Nothin' On) (in Catalan: 57 channels, and they do nothing) in which he criticized the emptiness of television programming despite the explosion of options. It's a song from 1992, but they could sing it again, changing channels by platforms, who have stopped compulsively changing channels with the remote, but now slide down the infinite slope ofscroll of their subscription services, without finding anything that really satisfies them.