Netflix was once thought to have killed regular TV, but these days the streaming service is starting to resemble a plain, old terrestrial channel.
In what seems like a whole other lifetime, people used to gather around the TV to watch our favourite shows on a specific day and a specific time. If you didn’t tune in at the right moment, you simply didn’t get to watch that week’s episode. There was no streaming, no catch-up services. The world practically came to an end for a class full of Finnish 15-year-olds who weren’t allowed to watch Lost on an overnight school trip back in 2006.
Then came Netflix.
Launching its streaming platform in 2007, Netflix wasn’t the first video streaming service, but it was the first big one that started to create its own programming while also streaming other movies and shows. Suddenly, you could finally watch all episodes of that one TV show you’ve always wanted to without forking out £15 per season for the DVD.
The biggest change came in 2013 when the first made-for-Netflix series, House Of Cards, began streaming and became a major hit (Netflix outbid others for the show, and turned heads when it ordered two seasons up front). Produced by David Fincher and starring Kevin Spacey, it marked the beginning of several directors and stars collaborating with the streaming service. Netflix, as well as other streamers, have provided directors more freedom, but with films, it has often come at the expense of theatrical releases.
Fincher isn’t the only high-profile director who has turned to Netflix with their passion projects. Martin Scorsese collaborated with Netflix for the release of The Irishman and Alfonso Cuarón received critical acclaim for the semi-autobiographical Roma. Barbie director Greta Gerwig is currently in the news for her Narnia adaptations, which Netflix is producing, but the release plans have proved tricky.
Perhaps the biggest Netflix phenomenon has been Stranger Things. Originally debuting in 2016, it’s one of the streamer’s most popular shows, attracting critical acclaim for its nostalgia-driven narratives and visuals. Fans are still waiting for its creators, the Duffer Brothers, to finish the show with season 5, which is reportedly out this year. Most of us devoured those early episodes in one go, unable to stop watching when the next episode was right there, just waiting for us to press play to know what happened next.
As more and more viewers turned to Netflix in those early years, to binge entire seasons of TV shows rather than wait to watch one episode a week, regular television started to seem like an ancient relic.
The rest is history, it seems. In 2025, Netflix is still one of the biggest streaming services and still produces its own films and TV shows. They vary in quality, but it seems that audiences are still keen to watch Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown fight alongside robots.
But things have changed dramatically since the old days of Netflix being a cheap way to access a library of films and TV. For one, prices have risen exponentially. When Netflix was launched in the UK in 2012, it cost you £5.99 to get access to the service. You can still get it for that price, but your films and programmes will have ad breaks.
If you don’t want to watch ads, it’ll cost you £12.99 a month for two devices or £18.99 if you want to be able to stream the material on four different devices and watch it in Ultra HD. Not to mention, Netflix has been cracking down on families and friend groups sharing passwords. It’s only a multi-billion company – it’s got to make its money somehow.
And it has a few varying ideas how to do so.
In January 2024, it was announced that Netflix had made a 10-year deal with WWE to start exclusively streaming Raw and SmackDown live every Monday and Friday. The deal was estimated to be worth $500m, more than its investment in any film.
Here’s the thing though. If you subscribe to Netflix without ads, you’re still getting the ad breaks during its WWE programming, which runs live on Mondays and Fridays. You won’t see anything advertised, but you’ll still have a break in the action with a screen that says we’ll be right back and perhaps some older footage of the wrestlers.
WWE fans are also in for a treat as its biggest event, Wrestlemania, will be broadcast live on Netflix in May. Previously, if you wanted to watch this, you had to pay extra to watch it on Sky, as the event wasn’t included on the Sports subscription. Now, a subscription to Netflix will suffice, making it much cheaper and more accessible for fans. It’s less about films and TV now: much as with a traditional TV station, the material is broadening in search of a bigger audience.
An argument could be made that if you can watch something live at a specific time each week and there are ad breaks, it’s just good, ol’ regular TV as well. Sure, you can still watch your favourite wrestlers smack the heck out of each other the day after and skip past the ads if you pay for that privilege, but you can do that with most catch-up TV platforms too.
When Netflix gained more and more acclaim for shows like the previously mentioned House Of Cards and Stranger Things as well as Orange Is The New Black, The Crown and Ozark, it was largely accused of killing the weekly appointment with a TV set. Watching your favourite show wasn’t a communal thing anymore and didn’t require you to get dibs on the TV remote before anyone else in your family did; you could now just watch what you wanted on your laptop, anytime it suited you.
It felt like a safe haven for many of us introverts, but it also created a strange sense of disconnect. It often takes me a while to be able to binge things and even with weekly shows, I rarely get to them on the day they’re available, which means it’s hard to talk to people about them and the chances of having things spoiled is exponentially higher.
Of course, it’s currently just WWE that’s being broadcast live, but could this be the start of something new? Could Netflix embrace the more traditional model of television and, more importantly, do we want that? There are soft nudges in that direction, and timed material, along with weekly episode drops, suggest a few ideas from the old way of doing things. It’s worth keeping an eye on…
