A Binge Too Far

Illustration of Netflix's current viewership model.

 Is there too much television right now? Hell, is there too much visual electronic media in general right now?
Don't get me wrong, I love watching movies, TV shows, and videos on the Internet, but the sheer amount of choices is starting to overwhelm me. This is in addition to the amount of times I go to the movies, plus the pile of DVDs I've been meaning to watch.
I only have a limited amount of free time every week. I can't just sit down and watch 100 hours of TV shows everyone's talking about. Yet, that's apparently what Netflix thinks, because they put out two or three original shows, one or two original movies, and dozens of other titles every week. Actually, that just describes Fridays.
Are any of those good? I don't know. I might as well go with what's popular, and therein lies the problem: in an ocean of choices, only a few can rise to the top, and thanks to binge-watching, those that do tend to take up the most time.
Streaming services like Netflix will use algorithms to curate suggestions for you. Did you like this show? Watch this other show next, or this show, or this movie, or that movie... I think a decent portion of my Netflix experience is just watching the beginning of something, and then scrolling through poster art to find something else I can watch the beginning of.
I recently went to a screening where Willem Dafoe did a talk afterwards, and he said that when you watch a movie on your computer or television, it doesn't command your attention as much as when you watch something on the big screen. (I should, however, mention that i found his half-hour conversation significantly more interesting and engaging than the 110 minutes of cinema that preceded it.) That sums up my feeling towards a lot of stuff on Netflix. It's not a situation where you're glued to a screen for the runtime until the commercial break happens, if there is one. There's 50 hours of television instantly online all at once, and you can quit it anytime.
Does Netflix expect anybody to watch that much? Do they want us to all turn into lethargic blobs, like in WALL-E?
Probably not, and that means that lesser-known and niche titles are going to slip through the cracks of viewers' attentions. Netflix gives nationwide exposure to several independent and foreign titles on a weekly basis, and it's unlikely anyone's even aware of them.
The old joke is that in the future we were going to have 500 channels and nothing to watch. Well, now this one channel has too much to watch.
By the way, I'm only talking about Netflix. Don't even get me started on YouTube. As for Amazon, they have too many movies as well, but a lot more of them suck.