How a decade of Netflix has changed how we watch TV in New Zealand forever

Ten years ago, streaming video broke like a tidal wave over New Zealand.

Global giant Netflix introduced its streaming service to Aotearoa in March 2015, and how we watch what we used to call just plain old "TV" has never quite been the same.

Netflix wasn't the first streamer to hit NZ - Spark's long-gone Lightbox launched in 2014, and Sky TV's Neon in February 2015 - but it proved the tipping point for watching everything from Squid Game to Country Calendar on our phones, laptops and smart TVs.

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Diana Wichtel is the queen of New Zealand television criticism, with a run as the Listener magazine's television critic from 1989 to 2020. She says claims television is “dying” are nothing new.

In her recent memoir looking back on her career, Unreel: A Life In Review,she wrote she is still "strangely upbeat about the future of television".

"I hope those who announced television's imminent death years ago have been eating their words along with their viewing snacks as they watched Succession, Fleabag, The Handmaid's Tale, Slow Horses, our own After the Party,” she said.

"I'm sticking to my mantra: the golden age of television is always right now and the best is yet to come."

Back in 2015, the first NZ Netflix customers soaked up shows including Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and BoJack Horseman.

Wichtel says her first few streaming addictions included "House of Cards, from memory, and Orange Is The New Black."

"These were early Netflix original series, but I probably saw them on Lightbox. Hilarious, shocking, heartbreaking, bingeable - both marked a shift to a very high gear for television drama."

Ten years later, Disney, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Neon and others all battle for our free time. Old-school TV channels like TVNZ, Whakaata Māori and Three now offer their own comprehensive streaming libraries.

Mark Stewart, a lecturer in media and creative technologies at the University of Waikato, notes when we watch used to be at the mercy of linear TV schedules.

"I think the move away from broadcast TV schedules has been a big change for a lot of people," he said.

"Time shifting of content (outside of news and sports) has become more and more common, although there are still a significant number of people who watch television at time of broadcast."

If anything, the problem is too much to watch.

"We have access to more content than we have ever been able to access before," Stewart said.

"However, we have also seen significant market fragmentation, so that now to be sure that you have access to anything you might want to watch, you probably need to be subscribed to four or five premium providers, minimum."

Belinda Plunkett of Auckland started the Facebook group NZ Streaming Shows in 2024 as a way of helping people sort through the content flood. She said streaming offers far more variety than linear TV once did.

"Usually TV channels just repeat the same shows over again.

"There's not much recommendations on shows on NZ streaming sites," she said. "There's nothing worse than wanting to watch something but not being able to find where to watch it."

And of course there's the perpetual dilemma - to binge or not to binge?

"I'm definitely a binger," Plunkett said. "Bingeing is the better way as it's easier to follow the story."

"We are all bingeing all the time," Wichtel agreed.

"The downside is that there's no time to process one episode and eagerly anticipate the next. It can feel like eating too many Tim Tams."

The 2024 Where Are The Audiences report by NZ On Air shows just how much things have changed. Global video sharing platforms reach the largest audience, 64 percent of New Zealanders daily, with subscription streaming at 56 percent. TikTok and YouTube have rapidly eclipsed Netflix’s dominance for many.

Back in NZ On Air's 2016 report, linear TV was still the biggest weekly reach at 86 percent.

TVNZ's own free streaming platform TVNZ+ is our most popular, while according to the 2024 survey Netflix reaches 38 percent of New Zealanders each day - but that's down from 42 percent in 2023.

Netflix is secretive about precise figures on viewership, and did not respond to requests for comment. However, a Roy Morgan survey from 2022 found 2.2 million people watched Netflix in an average four weeks.

When it first kicked off, a Netflix subscription was $9.99 a month, but today plans range anywhere from $14.99 for the bare basics to $27.99 for all the bells and whistles.

With everything from Korean comedy to Scandinavian noir available at the push of a button, does that mean New Zealand's own stories get lost in the mix?

"I do worry about how we will keep telling our stories, particularly in a time when a dreary, back-to-basics mentality undervalues creative endeavour of all kinds," Wichtel says.

"Though you don't want to get too nostalgic. The Topp Twins and Billy T James were groundbreakers and Country Calendar remains a national treasure. But these days we also have access to an incredible range of stories from across cultures."

Stewart says that shared cultural experiences have receded due to audience fragmentation.

"I also think we are running a real risk of losing some of our cultural identity by not making enough cultural projects that speak to the experiences of living in Aotearoa New Zealand.

"Netflix might produce some content here, because we make it economically inviting, but the content they produce does not have anything to say about the lived experiences of those who live here.

"NZ On Air, Creative NZ, and Te Māngai Pāho work really hard to fund content, but they each have their own requirements, and are also desperately underfunded."

But despite it all, Wichtel says, you can still find distinctive Aotearoa content out there in the streaming universe.

"Local television is a social good and needs to be well funded.

"A heartening thing is that, on what remains of television as we used to know it, we hear te reo and events like Matariki and Te Matatini get mainstream coverage.

"Culture cuts its own channels. There is no stopping it."