By Ian Hugo – Staff Reporter

Over the past several years, Netflix, the revolutionary television-streaming service, has been continuously expanding and has seen its popularity grow larger and larger each year since it was founded in 1997.

While many folks with Netflix subscriptions like to come home, sit down in front of the TV, and watch an episode or two of “House of Cards”, that’s certainly not the case for all.

For instance, take the case of Brandon Macey, a junior at Jonathan Law. Macey has said that in one school week (five days) he watched five seasons of the hit A&E television series “Storage Wars.”

Considering each season of “Storage Wars” is comprised of between 20-30 episodes each running around 20 minutes, Macey’s “feat” comes as no small achievement.

Or take the case of Thomas Kinross, a junior at Jonathan Law, who watched six seasons of “Lost”, the ABC hit drama with around 20-25 episodes per season each running at a length of 45 minutes per episode, in the span of just two short weeks.

While this may seem alarming to some, “binge-watching” has become widely accepted in mainstream society as of late. Macey and Kinross are just two of millions of Netflix users who have undoubtedly “binged” on Netflix every now and then.

A 2013 study by Netflix of 1,500 TV streamers (online U.S. adults who stream TV at least once a week) found that 61 percent of those surveyed binge watch regularly. 73 percent of the 1,500 users that were surveyed defined binge-watching as watching between 2-6 episodes of the same show in one sitting.

While some companies may be wary of the term “binge” associated with their product, this is something Netflix is proud of. Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, believes that binge-watching has the opportunity to change how stories are told through television and movies.

“I really think we have the chance to radically change the depth of character connectivity,” Sarandos said.

Although sometimes it may not seem that way, Netflix has a huge amount of shows and movies in its database: Netflix’s content library contains over a petabyte of video- that’s 1,048,576 gigabytes. Netflix CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings was quoted saying in 2011, “Our brand at Netflix is really focused on movies and TV shows.”

According to the previously-mentioned 2013 study done by Netflix through Harris Interactive, 61% of those 1,500 surveyed agreed with the statement, “There are too many shows to watch, and not enough time to watch them.” Each month, Netflix users spend over 1 billion hours streaming and watching all sorts of shows and movies offered by the on-demand media streaming company.

While Netflix is seen as the “premier” video-streaming service, other companies such as Hulu and Amazon Prime Instant Video cannot be passed over. While Hulu, 6 million+ users, and Amazon Prime Instant Video, around 8 million users, are dwarfed by Netflix’s numbers of over 60 million worldwide users, each provides a large variety of television and movies, some of which are not on Netflix, that add to the huge library of content accessible online to the public for streaming.

Unsurprisingly, like many other quasi-new “Internet Age” products, young people use Netflix the most. Geoffrey Graybeal, a professor at the College of Media and Communications at Texas Tech, conducted a study in 2014 on college students and their use of Netflix. Graybeal found that nine out of ten college students in the study were found to use Netflix on a regular basis, and more often than not binge-watch.

According to Graybeal, 68 percent of college students use Netflix to binge-watch while only 11 percent use television marathons.

“Some students use television for binge-watching, such as when a marathon of a show is on, but Netflix is used more to watch in mass than any other form of streaming,” said Graybeal.

According to a 2013 study conducted by Nielsen, a global information and measurement company, 63 percent of the population that streams content online does not have children. Graybeal also added that those aged 18-29 are the age group most likely to binge-watch.

“Nielsen also did a study that concluded that 88 percent of people who use Netflix binge-watch shows,” Graybeal said. “With the way Netflix works, users only have around 15 seconds in between episodes to decide if they want to keep watching. It is easier for them to just click next and watch the next episode.”

Most students use Netflix as a form of relaxing and destressing and binge-watch when they do not have class, such as the weekend, even though they know it can distract them from their schoolwork, according to Graybeal.

“One reason they use it is to just escape from reality by immersing themselves in a show,” he said.

Unsurprisingly, there is a negative side to watching television and Netflix in large quantities. Graybeal cites becoming depressed about running out of episodes to watch to being distracted from schoolwork and lagging behind in one’s studies specifically.

“When someone is doing one thing, they are also not doing something else,” Graybeal said. “TV is entertainment by design, but students should have the incentive to control it.”

While Graybeal, a professor at Texas Tech, may be more concerned with the negative effects on students and their academics, there is substantial evidence that binge-watching Netflix can have a negative effect on one’s physical health as well.

“There’s convincing evidence in adults that the more television people watch, the more likely they are to gain weight or become overweight or obese,” Lilian Cheung, a lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health, recently told NBC News. “And there’s emerging evidence that too much TV watching also increases the risk of weight-related chronic diseases, such as Type 2 diabetes.”

However, don’t think that getting outside and running some laps after binge-watching a season of “The Office” will undo the damage done to your body after a substantial amount of “sit-time.” But for those binge-watchers looking to watch their weight or lead a healthier diet, binge-watching allows viewers to skip fast-food commercials, which may be a major link between television and obesity, according to Cheung.

John Black, a professor at the Teacher’s College at Columbia University who studies how technology affects learning and memory, compared binge-watching to becoming addicted to drugs.

“You take a dosage of a drug and have a certain amount of reaction to it,” Black said. “But if you keep doing it, it takes more and more of the same drug to get the same reaction. If you’re watching too much at a time, you kind of get dull to it and you’re not really appreciating the show.”

Netflix, a pleasurable activity that releases endorphins and helps us relax, feeds viewers’ binge-watching addictions by automatically playing the next episode in a series 15 seconds after the previous episode ended. Viewers, or more binge-watchers more specifically, would much rather wait 15 seconds for the next episode to play than reach over, grab the remote, turn the TV off, and get back to whatever tasks are awaiting them back in the “real world.”

In addition to the negative physical effects binge-watching can have on viewers, there are also a substantial amount of negative emotional/mental side effects as well. Yoon Hi Sung, Eun Yeon Kang and Wei-Na Lee from the University of Texas at Austin recently conducted a survey given to 316 18-29 year olds on how often they watched TV, how often they had feelings of loneliness and depression, and how often they binge-watched TV.

Their research found that the more lonely and depressed participants were, the more likely they were to binge-watch television, using binge-watching to attempt to distance themselves from these negative feelings. Those who lacked the ability to control themselves were more likely to binge-watch, not being able to stop watching after the end of an episode.

“Even though some people argue that binge-watching is a harmless addiction, findings from our study suggest that binge-watching should no longer be viewed this way,” Sung said. “Physical fatigue and problems such as obesity and other health problems are related to binge-watching and they are a cause for concern. When binge-watching becomes rampant, viewers may start to neglect their work and their relationships with others. Even though people know they should not, they have difficulty resisting the desire to watch episodes continuously. Our research is a step toward exploring binge-watching as an important media and social phenomenon.”

While the practice of binge-watching can be negative, mentally and physically, in the long run, stringing together a few episodes in a row every now and then won’t drastically alter your well-being forever. For many, such as Macey and Kinross, they see binge-watching not as an addiction with negative effects, but as a hobby, something just to pass the time.

“I don’t consider binge-watching as an addiction. It’s more of a hobby because it only takes up a small part of my life and I am fully capable of controlling my watching,” Macey said.

(Some information courtesy of dailytoreador.com, hsph.harvard.edu, eurekaalert.org, huffingtonpost.com, cinemablend.com, consumer.healthday.com, everydayhealth.com)