Netflix, Stan, Foxtel Now, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube Premium, 10 All Access, hayu, Kayo,
ABC iView, SBS On Demand, 7Plus, 9Now, 10Play.
That’s the current lineup of streaming services in Australia.
If that wasn’t enough, Disney+ is coming in November.
There’s also news of horror streaming service Shudder making its way over in the not-too-distant
future, as well as possibly independent film specialist Sundance Now.
How many streaming services does Australia need?
Have we reached peak subscription?
Apparently, we have become a culture of maximum exposure.
Everything is available all the time.
But on top of all these video streaming services, there’s also gaming platforms, eBooks, as
well as music streaming.
We are certainly spoilt for choice.
But is all this choice good for us?
I don’t think it is.
Choice very quickly becomes an anxiety-inducing burden.
If you go back 20 years or so, your cultural diet was limited to how much you could afford,
or how much you could fit in your house.
Movies took up actual physical space on VHS or DVD.
You were limited to how much TV you could watch because there were only about five TV
channels.
You watched what was on, or turned the TV off.
And that’s what we did.
Children’s TV shows were only on at particular times of the day, so what did we do in the
meantime?
We went outside and played.
I remember our parents getting angry at us, not because we watched too much TV, but because
we were staying outside too long!
They’d stick their head out the window and call us home for dinner when it was getting
too dark.
We’d always ask for a few more minutes, because we just loved being outside.
Now things have changed.
Parents are hesitant to let their children play outside by themselves unless they are
fully supervised.
I guess this is partly due to a number of high-profile child abductions over the last
couple of decades, but also due to the rise of home entertainment.
Video streaming services and gaming platforms allow kids to stay home all day and watch
anything, or play anything they want to with very minimal parental supervision required.
Unless parents put in a lot of effort, kids are being raised indoors with all the developmental
problems associated with that.
Playing outdoors allows a kid to learn on multiple levels.
Imaginary castles, tree houses, cops and robbers, hide-and-seek.
Studies have shown that outdoor play not only increases brain development, but also increases
a child’s social skills.
This leads to happier children who are smarter, do better at school, and have a lot more friends.
Constantly being indoors has crippled an entire generation of children.
Anyway, back to the point of this video — Choice Overload.
Music and pop culture reporter, Paul Donoughue, sent out a Tweet a couple of weeks ago asking
the following,
“Do you ever sit down to watch TV at night and spend the whole time scrolling Netflix/Stan/
something else, and flip through all 112 million titles and recommendations, and never actually find
something, and then just go to bed?”
It’s an interesting question that it turns out that most people can relate to.
About 80% of responses were affirmative: “Every night”, “This is my main hobby”, “Doesn’t
everyone?
Is there a German word for it?”.
I’ve done two free 30-day trials with Netflix over the years, and both times, I ran into
the same problem.
There was just too much choice and I didn’t know what to watch.
I ended up watching a few movies with my son, the first episode of a couple of series, and
that was about it.
There was just too much to watch.
Every time I started watching a new series, I felt like that there was probably something
better out there.
I still have an email sitting in my inbox offering me another 30-day free trial on Netflix
as well one from YouTube offering me a free trial of their premium TV service.
But I just don’t have the time or the desire to watch anymore TV.
Plain old YouTube and free-to-air TV is enough for me.
American psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote a book about this back in 2004 titled, “The
Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less”.
In it, he talks about the two negative effects of having too much choice.
Number 1 – Too much choice produces paralysis, not liberation.
With too many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all.
Number 2 – Even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up
less satisfied than if we had fewer options to choose from.
If the choice we make ends up not being very good, it’s easy to imagine that we could
have made a different choice that would have been a lot better.
Consequently, we end up regretting the decision that we made, and this regret subtracts from
our satisfaction even if the decision was actually a good one.
If you think about it, it makes sense.
If you have three flavours of ice cream to choose from, Strawberry, Chocolate, and Vanilla,
then the choice is fairly simple.
I feel like chocolate today, so I’ll eat chocolate.
I can always eat strawberry tomorrow.
But if there were a thousand choices of ice cream, with 300 different flavours of chocolate,
with 100 advertisers telling us which ice cream is better.
It would be much harder to make a decision.
And that’s pretty much what Netflix, Stan, and Foxtel are… a smorgasbord of ice cream
flavours.
There are 25 different crime dramas to choose from, 50 different sitcoms, thousands of movies,
and new shows coming out every day.
In the end, we just go into paralysis mode, waste our night trying to find something to
watch, and then end up watching nothing and going to bed.
This constant bombardment of advertising through the mass media has left us in a perpetual
state of questioning ourselves: “What did I miss?”; “Would I be happier if I had
chosen something different?”.
In the end, I think we need to focus on gratitude for what we already have.
We should learn to be content with a simpler life, and not let ourselves get caught up
in the world of endless streaming TV.
It doesn’t make us happy — It just leads to more anxiety.
What are your thoughts?
Do you find that there is just too much choice in the modern-day world?
Do we really need this many on-demand, streaming video services?
Was it better when we just had a TV set with four or five channels, and as a special treat,
we’d go to cinema with our friends and watch a movie?
Is too much choice, bad?