“The length of a film should be directly related to the capacity of the human bladder,” Alfred Hitchcock once said. But that’s far from the only rule of the screen that Netflix, the world’s leading streaming service, has overturned.
Two years ago, the inventor of binge-watching had raised doubts about the long-term viability of its business model. Too high costs to feed the incessant flow of content, and not enough subscribers to buy it, seemed to signal the need for a complete reinvention at a time when viewer interest was fading and competition was intensifying.
