Binge-watching is the practice of consuming multiple episodes of a television series in rapid succession, typically through a streaming service that makes the entire season immediately available on release.
The behavior pre-dates streaming — VHS box sets, DVD marathons, and cable reruns produced the same pattern — but became culturally codified after 📝Netflix shifted to whole-season drops in 2013 and ran an influential 2014 survey in which 73% of respondents defined binge-watching as "two to six episodes or more of the same show in one sitting."
The phrase entered Merriam-Webster in 2015 and reshaped how series are written, marketed, and measured: serialized arcs, cliff-hanger pacing tuned to autoplay, and release-window strategy all bent around the assumption that audiences would watch in compressed sittings rather than weekly installments. The recent return to weekly releases by some streamers is a deliberate counter-move against that gravity.