In 2024, I found a Black Friday deal for a year at one of the big streaming sites for $20. I jumped at it, and then spent the next six months just looking at all of the stuff on the service and thinking about how long it would take me to watch it. Then I would close the app and go do something else.

I can't help it, it's a thing that I do. It's also why by video game backlog is so big. Every time I want to start a new one, I go to https://howlongtobeatcom and see approximately how long it would take me to finish it. Then I think about that commitment, have second thoughts, and then put the game back on the shelf to go do something else. 30 hours is a big commitment, you know?

It turned out that I did the same thing with TV shows on the big streaming platforms. For example, I'd find a series that I've seen before and would like to see again, but then I find out that the series has 172 episodes. How am I supposed to watch that? I could do one episode a week like it was when the series was on the air, but that would take 172 weeks to go through. I could watch a couple of episodes a night. If I did two a night, I could blast through the series in 86 nights. That's practically three months of watching the show every night. I could maybe do three a night, but my time in the evenings is already limited enough. If I did three episodes in a night, that's my entire free time budget for an evening. Even if I spread that out, it's a big ask.

But what if that's the whole point?

Back around 2005, I ended up quitting TV cold turkey for about a year for reasons that don't really need going into here, and I never fully relapsed back into the 'just have the TV on all the time for background noise' habit. When I came back to TV in 2006-ish, it was so different that I almost didn't recognize it. Cable channels had starting down the 'just show 18-hour marathons of one show' format, and binge-watching had de facto been born. I got tired of that pretty quickly and ditched my cable subscription for a set of rabbit ears.

But that only provided a partial respite.

When I made the switch to over-the-air broadcasting supplemented with Internet videos, I picked up something like 10 program streams (digital subchannels have completely changed the game), and today, I get over 40 (some of them are so weak, I can only pick them up when the stars align, so the number is approximate). Most of them just show endless marathons of a handful of shows. I know¹ that nobody is tuning in to a 16-hour marathon of Storage Wars or whatever every Tuesday.

My guess is that these things are set up this way, not for anyone to watch front to back, but because, in a moment of boredom, you might reach for the TV remote without a specific goal in mind, and then just turn on the Storage Wars channel to see what they're pawing through today ². Or maybe you don't like that show. Maybe you want to watch M*A*S*H reruns, or maybe Looney Tunes, or Star Trek, or Bonanza, or any of a hundred niches. The point is, you don't even have to think about it. All you need to do is be bored for a second and your TV is already showing something that will scratch that itch. Just turn it on and watch. ³

The people running these networks have to know that nobody outside a waiting room is watching 15 straight hours of Hudson & Rex, but I don't think that they care. They've latched on to what is apparently a winning strategy: find a niche and fill it with whatever you can get. As long as you can load it up with ads, it doesn't matter what the niche is.

But what if you could go further?

The streaming platforms know that nobody is sitting on their couch watching six hours of CSI: Miami every day, but, for some people, familiarity is a comforting presence. You've already seen the show, so you already know whodunit and you don't have to pay that much attention to it. The stakes are low, and I get how that can be a kind of comforting presence⁴. I think that's why the big ones put everything they own or can get the rights to onto them. Why worry about finding out where Law & Order: SVU is playing, when it can be playing on the Peacock app right now ⁵. But maybe you're not an SVU person. There's a thousand other shows you can pick from. Or maybe your favorite niche is filled by one of the hundreds of shows on another platform. Or maybe it's filled by a platform that only shows a lot of one kind of thing instead.

But what if you could go further?

What if the things you want to watch don't have to be TV shows? What if it could just be compilations of cats falling asleep, or old TV commercials from when you were a kid, or that clip from an old TV show or movie that you were just talking about, or gossip, or pranks, or just anything? Free video platforms spend a lot of money trying to figure you out (yes, I'm talking about the specific you that's reading this article right now), and what you want to see. What will entice you to come to the platform and what will get you to stay.

But what if you could go further?

If you want to watch videos of, say, porch pirates getting busted by prank boxes, there's no shortage of those on the internet already. But someone has to collect them, remove all the watermarks and attributions, and put them into compilations. That's work. Instead, you can just put a few prompts into an AI system to generate infinite short videos. And they can be about anything. They all only need to last for a few seconds, anyway, if you're making a compilation. Now you have actual unlimited content that you can watch forever.

It's not just videos, either, every medium is filling up with AI-generated content that's overwhelming everything else. Podcasts, digital art, blogs: we were already drowning in low-effort filler⁶, but now the problem is worse, and I don't see it getting any better as long as ad-revenue is the primary driver of content creation on the Internet.

And, personally, I've had about all I can take.

I'm as guilty as anyone about getting bored for a moment, and then immediately reaching for something to make the boredom go away, and that thing lately has been YouTube. I'm ready for that to change.

Starting now ('now' meaning a few weeks ago), I'm going to be streaming less video. I'm letting my subscriptions to most of the streaming services I had lapse. I'm not going to have a dedicated YouTube tab. I'm going to slowly pull channels out of my RSS reader if I haven't looked at them in a while (I have no formal definition of what 'a while' is, but I'll know it when I get there). My goal here isn't to eschew streaming completely. There are some things that are interesting and worthwhile to take in. My goal is to rewire that part of my brain that just reflexively reaches for a YouTube search when there's even the tiniest twinge of boredom.

Despite the timing of this post, this isn't a New Year's Resolution or anything. It's been bubbling away at the back of my head for the past several months, and I'm just getting it written down.

This article was posted on 30 Dec 2025 and I haven't looked at it since.