Netflix Is Taking Over The World And No One Seems To Be Worried About It

‘Are you still watching?’ is a loaded question that, by now, we’re all too familiar with. What we can only imagine to have been Netflix’s well intended method of making sure you hadn’t accidentally fallen asleep and left the second season of Riverdale playing in the background, started to feel accusatory and judgemental. It started to feel like an awkward reminder that, yes, you are binge watching a show alone in the dark, wearing the same clothes as yesterday with a sprinkling of Dorito dust in your hair.

And, as most relatable realisations do, it became a meme. A really funny one, of course. But what if our obsessive Netflix habits have surpassed the lol-able boundaries of memedom? I don’t mean to alarm anyone but Netflix owns our asses. And that could become something a bit more sinister than we realise.

On an uninspired weekday evening over the Christmas break, I was watching TV with my nan. Her routine is pretty standard - she puts the news on, flicks to another news channel, hovers over a cooking show for a while, gives up and then hands me the remote. Don’t laugh, but it was the first time I’d held a remote control in quite a while – why would I need to when I have a phone and a laptop? But the fact that I noticed the novelty of it felt really, really odd.

I didn’t read too much into it at the time, and proceeded to merrily flick through unfamiliar channels to find something to fill the couple of hours before dinner. After too many minutes of tuning in, not understanding and then switching to another channel, I found myself getting overwhelmedly wound up by the irregularity of it all.

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‘How the hell am I meant to settle in to anything without knowing what’s going on when everything’s already fucking started’, I thought as I pleadingly worked my way through the uncooperative TV guide for something that happened to be starting at 17 minutes past the hour. Needless to say, I didn’t find anything. So I surrendered to my internal tantrum, trudged upstairs and watched Love Actually (again) on my own in bed simply because I knew I could watch it on my own terms.

On demand is a blessing. The control is very much in our hands and we can orientate our viewing schedules to our time-precious lifestyles, which have inevitably changed quite dramatically since television first became a thing all those decades ago. But at what point does that become a problem?

Watching live TV is a bit of an occasion, these days. Save for First Dates, Great British Bake Off and last year’s Love Island phenomenon, it’s hard to pin point the time of day that we organise ourselves on mass around pre-scheduled programming when we’re so used to doing it the other way around now. We squeeze a couple of episodes of streaming services’ various offerings into our commutes, our lunch breaks and that last precious hour before going to bed. And at the centre of this web of on-demand dependency is Netflix, the black and red beacon of uninterrupted telly viewing.

I know as much as anyone that other streaming services are available, of course.Amazon Prime TV has some incredible shows at the moment. BBC recently announced a similar service with it’s back catalogue of classic TV shows. Hell, All4 is great too. But if I’m going to go back and watch the first and second seasons of Skins (aka, the best two), then I’m probably going to go and do that on Netflix rather than the On-Demand service of its home channel. Sorry.

Netflix dominates, you see. And that’s just something we’ve all come to expect. Since announcing their 8-billion-dollar content budget for 2018, actors, directors and huge production companies are flocking to Netflix in huge numbers. Netflix made history in becoming the first streaming service to get eight Oscar nominations – a huge accolade after the controversy of enteringnon-cinema release films into Cannes Film Festival last year.

Netflix became a verb years ago back when the internet coined ‘Netflix and Chill’, a phrase-cum-meme that has surpassed that awkward window of still being socially acceptable to share without seeming out of touch (and not funny), and landed as quite simply being one of those phrases we slip into conversation without really noticing. They have an expected 128 million subscribers worldwide, and while that’s just a fraction of the global population, it’s still twice as many people as there are in the UK, half of the US, and that’s a serious level of influence. And that’s only expected to grow.

You can’t help but wonder where that level of influence and access becomes too much. The answer is probably when the scores of data that’s gathered by such a substantial company is used less than admirable ways. You might remember when Netflix tweeted ‘To the 53 people who’ve watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?’. Some people were into it, but others thought it was inappropriate, invasive and not as funny as they probably thought it would be.

It quite rightly called into question Netflix’s use of data that they so famously keep very tight lipped on. And of course, the awkwardness and general scepticism around just how much Netflix know – and actively monitor – our viewing activity doesn’t go away all on its own. At least, it hasn’t for me.

This doesn't mean that my Netflix viewing habits have lessened at all. Lol, don't be ridiculous. I'm one of the many who quite literally imagine life without it. But, call me paranoid, I can't help silently panic a little when I realise how long I spend scrolling through the endless list of titles when it would probably be a lot easier to just pop E4 on and be done with it. I hesitate, albeit momentarily, when I recall that story about the person who received an email from Netflix to check they were okay after it noted a change in their viewing behaviour.

I can't be the only one who's a bit nervous about this shift in power that so many of the older stations don't have a chance of keeping up with. I'm not one to stand in the way of technological progress, but is anyone else fast-forwarding to a Black Mirror-style future where Netflix literally controls what we watch? Just me? Okay.

Follow Jazmin on Instagram @JazKopotsha

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.