Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’ latest season of her reality show, With Love, Meghan, drops today on Netflix. In line with the streamer’s strategy for its flagship programs, all eight episodes are available to binge immediately.
It’s a strategy that serves journalists well, offering plenty of controversial moments to highlight from a celebrity whose ties to the U.K. royal family continue to generate headlines. But it also underscores how approaches to consuming content have changed.
Historically, TV shows aired new episodes week after week, creating appointment viewing. With the streaming era, that model shifted—though Netflix remains unique in its commitment to releasing entire seasons at once, according to recent analysis by Ampere Analysis, a research company.
Some 84% of Netflix’s original TV releases are full-season drops, compared with 60% on Disney+, 57% on Peacock, and only 34% on Apple TV+. HBO Max is the least likely to release entire seasons, with just 28% of its programming arriving all at once.
“Netflix rose to prominence with this facilitating binge viewing model, and it’s what a lot of Netflix audience has come to expect with their new favorite shows coming out,” says Rahul Patel, principal analyst at Ampere Analysis.
Beyond audience expectations, practical considerations also drive the approach. “Netflix has always done the binge strategy,” says Kasey Moore, founder of What’s on Netflix, which tracks the platform’s new releases. That’s largely due to the sheer volume of its output. “It’s because the amount of shows and movies that they’re putting out,” he says.
The scale of Netflix’s operations prevents it from devoting marketing efforts to weekly episode drops. Instead, releasing entire seasons at once allows for large-scale promotion of specific titles. “Apple TV+ is a really good example where they just don’t have that volume of output,” Moore adds. He once tried to map out in a spreadsheet how Netflix could release everything weekly but found “dozens and dozens of shows” overlapping, making it impractical. Only 2% of Netflix programming is released weekly, compared with 33% on HBO Max, according to Ampere Analysis.
Scale, Patel agrees, is central to Netflix’s strategy. “Netflix is releasing content at such a high frequency that when it comes to considering churn mitigation, it’s essentially the subsequent big release that’s coming out in two, three, or four weeks’ time that’s keeping subscribers engaged with the service,” he says. Expecting viewers to wait six to eight weeks for a full season is unrealistic for Netflix. By contrast, Disney+, with far fewer releases, experiments with alternative models. Roughly one in four of its shows drop multiple episodes per week, though not full seasons. Amazon’s Prime Video employs a similar approach, balancing stacked premieres with weekly episodes.
According to Patel, Netflix’s incumbency enables its all-at-once model in a way rivals cannot match. Subscribers often factor a Netflix subscription into their monthly expenses, while newer streamers must actively keep users engaged across billing cycles. “If a subscriber is joining for a particular show, they might need to stay subscribed for the following nine weeks, for the rest of the run,” Patel explains. “In an alternative world, if that show was released all in one go, that’s an instance where they could binge watch across a weekend or a couple of weeks, and then perhaps churn from the service.”
Whether Netflix’s “big drop” approach actually works remains debated. “It depends who you’re looking at,” says Moore. “Netflix is always Netflix first, rather than basing itself on any individual show, but I’m not sure you could say that about some of its rivals anymore.” For competitors, the brand image is more closely tied to individual programs.
“With a lot of these services, the brand image is obviously very important, and a lot of that does come from the content and the type of content they have,” Patel says.
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