Breaking Bad finished its live run on AMC last fall with record ratings, and it appears to be staying on top of the heap as consumers now turn to video-on-demand and over-the-top streaming outlets to binge on the series about teacher-turned-meth-lord Walter White.
In a survey of 15,196 consumers conducted by TiVo Research and Analytics and released last week, 35% of respondents said they binged on Breaking Bad, outpacing Netflix’s House of Cards (29%) and HBO’s Game of Thrones (25%). AMC’s The Walking Dead (24%) and PBS’ Downton Abbey (23%) rounded out the top five. TiVo Research defines binge-viewing as watching three episodes of the same program in one day.
The survey also showed binge-viewing is no longer just a trend, but a way of life for an expanding group of consumers: 91% of those surveyed said they participated in this fine art, with 40% saying they had binged within a week of the survey and 69% revealing they had binged within the last month.
About 29% of respondents said they deliberately put off watching an entire season of a show until they could watch the whole season at once.
That has contributed to another emerging habit TiVo Research has begun tracking — the “super binge,” which occurs when a consumer gobbles up an entire season (or more) of a specific program over multiple days. TiVo Research said about three-quarters of those surveyed had done some supersized binging, with 14% having done so in the week prior to the survey.
And, they have no qualms about it. TiVo Research found just one-third of respondents said they felt the term “binge viewing” had negative connotations, compared with 53% who thought so in TiVo’s April 2013 survey.
TiVo conducted this year’s study in April, tapping into a panel of TiVo subscribers whose second-by-second viewing behavior is anonymously tracked on an ongoing basis (they all opt-in to the program).
Separately, TiVo’s anonymous tracking data for the year revealed additional binge-viewing trends.
