It's partially cultural. At some point I realized that when American friends say "I've watched that", they more often than not mean it was running off to the side or in the background while they were doing other tasks. Previously I was mystified why anyone would watch certain type of content that wouldn't be able to hold anyone's attention span.
It seems quite common in the US to have TVs in several rooms and have them run in the background for long stretches of day. This is far less common in the cultures I've lived in where sitting down to watch TV alone or together is more of an occasion and modal, and TVs have no place outside the living room.
This is to say the use case different folks have for TVs also varies widely. Now, when I do sit down at the TV, I generally appreciate the nice big screen.
> It seems common in the US to have TVs in several rooms and have them run in the background for long stretched of day. This is far less common in the cultures I've lived in where sitting down to watch TV alone or together is more of an occasion and modal.
> Tomorrow Warner Bros. Discovery is supposed to reveal it’s new but not really new streaming service. What once was called HBO Max will now just be called Max, according to The New York Times.
> Beyond the name change, it could include more light reality TV shows like “Dr. Pimple Popper” and “House Hunters International” —you know, the shows you might put on in the background while you’re doing chores, paying bills or working.
> There’s a term for shows like that: ambient streaming.
> In this and other recent programming, Netflix is pioneering a genre that I’ve come to think of as ambient television. It’s “as ignorable as it is interesting,” as the musician Brian Eno wrote, when he coined the term “ambient music” in the liner notes to his 1978 album “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” a wash of slow melodic synth compositions. Ambient denotes something that you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily. Like gentle New Age soundscapes, “Emily in Paris” is soothing, slow, and relatively monotonous, the dramatic moments too predetermined to really be dramatic.
For me, the culture has shifted. With regular cable TV, we definitely had the TV on more often and just in the background with maybe nobody paying particular attention to it. I actually found it quite helpful when working from home to have that sort of background noise.
However, in the time of streaming this has gone completely away in our household. The TV is only on for the time it takes to to watch a show and then is immediately turned off.
Frankly, I find a lot of films are better as "background watching".
I especially find Marvel movies much better at home. I might find one entirely OK watched at home, but get frustrated and bored with the same film in the theater, and leave feeling pretty unhappy with it. This is because I can divide my attention at home, and most Marvel movies are kinda worse the more closely you're watching them. Poor filming and editing, interminable action scenes that have me wanting to take a nap rather than watch them by a certain point—all that's better if you can check out for chunks of the movie.
And this isn't a my-attention-span thing: I closely watch "boring" shit like silent films all the time, because they reward close watching far more than a lot of modern blockbusters do (older blockbusters often reward it better, too—at least, the ones we still remember)
It seems quite common in the US to have TVs in several rooms and have them run in the background for long stretches of day. This is far less common in the cultures I've lived in where sitting down to watch TV alone or together is more of an occasion and modal, and TVs have no place outside the living room.
This is to say the use case different folks have for TVs also varies widely. Now, when I do sit down at the TV, I generally appreciate the nice big screen.