The upstart tech executive was confident people would keep clicking on their videos.
“This is really programmed to be addictive,” he said, noting how consuming content on his firm’s platform kept you “hooked.” While many companies were trying to master this new age of compulsive viewing, the executive believed no one else had found the secret sauce. “I don’t know that our specific competitor has really emerged yet at all,” he said.
That executive was Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, and he made the comments in 2013, talking to NPR Marketplace just as Orange Is the New Black dropped on the service. TikTok was three years away from launching.
You could be forgiven for thinking the remarks applied to the viral-video app, which over the past five years has become a kind of Pringles Potato Chip of digital watching: Once you pop, you can’t stop. What Netflix had once done to Hollywood — using algorithms to make video irresistible — TikTok has done to Netflix. Likely permanently.
TikTok’s future in the U.S. remains murky. After going dark briefly Saturday night, it was back Sunday morning as the company alluded to an executive order that incoming president Donald Trump would sign delaying a ban. Its long-term fate is unclear given the Supreme Court’s unanimous upholding of a Congressional law forcing owner ByteDance to sell to a non-Chinese firm.
But don’t be distracted by the Washington soap opera. Whether TikTok endures for years or goes to the great honeycomb challenge in the sky, it’s already won a game traditional entertainment realized only too late it was playing.
Netflix-style streaming once seemed like the great innovator, creating a whole new model of immersive viewing that made you forget the outside world with its eight-hour arcs. But what technology giveth, technology taketh away. Binge-watching turned out to be just one link in a longer chain. And TikTok was the stronger one that followed. Forget eight-hour arcs; you could now watch 80 videos in an hour. And they all seemed to scratch exactly what itched.
For all its newness, the app was continuing a TV trend that had made video-storytelling a participatory sport dating back to the 1980s, when shows like Hill Street Blues and Twin Peaks created addictive immersive experiences in a way television rarely had before. That trend intensified with series like The Sopranos and Survivor in the early 2000s, which gave way to the streaming culture of the 2010s. Each time out, providers made their stuff harder to turn off, the content and increasingly the technology combining to make watching as much a compulsion as a leisure choice.
TikTok followed in this tradition, one broccoli haircut and Khaby Lame sass at a time. When you finished one video you had to watch another, the algorithm knowing how to hook us the way David Chase once knew how to hook us.
What of course changed was what was doing the hooking. Where storytelling in the Hollywood age was long, and polished, and centralized, storytelling in the TikTok era was the opposite — short, and shaggy, and mostly decentralized. If The Sopranos and The Crown were five-course dinners, a delectable pleasure to savor arriving once each season, TikTok was a McDonald’s burger, there for us to chomp down and crave another whenever we wanted.
And McDonald’s always wins.
Part of the reason for this is financial. TikTok has double the number of Netflix subscribers in the U.S. (about 170 million) because its content base can be built cheaply. Professional shows are expensive. Relying on everyone to submit their videos isn’t.
But the bigger factor is cultural. When you can create the videos you’re watching, you’re naturally going to be more invested. TikTok videos were made by people just like us, who unlike the celebrity era were really just like us. And sometimes, if we deigned to post, actually us. (For the impact TikTok had on creator culture, check out this excellent essay.)
The idea of watching shorter also quickly became a given — yes, for younger people without the muscle-memory of plunging deep into an eight-hour series but for the rest of us too. There’s strong evidence that TikTok has changed our biology. A study using an fMRI test to measure brain activity found that heavy use of the app — with its fun videos that always seem to be followed by another one we want — actually activated parts of the brain associated with attention span and subsequently lowered it in turn. TikTok didn’t just shake up the model. It literally rewired our minds.
Most of Hollywood has been either oblivious to this assault or rendered helpless by it, at most using TikTok to try to market its content, which is a little like trying to advertise your horse-and-buggy service on the side of a Model T. (Quibi, for all its misguidedness, got one thing right: It savvily attempted to corral the ethos of TikTok into traditional Hollywood, combining the values of serial storytelling with short-form clickability. Turns out that’s a recipe for incompatibility. But Jeffrey Katzenberg was correct in identifying the problem.)
None of this of course means that there won’t be some good television series that compel us in the years ahead. But traditional, series-based television’s pride-of-place in both the business and cultural firmaments — the idea that the product of a writer’s room and weeklong shoot is our go-to watch on a digital screen — is getting more marginal by the day.
Then again, TikTok’s not the end of the chain either. There will be more links added, and I don’t mean the current attempts by Meta, Substack and YouTube to imitate TikTok (though in the short term they’ll sate the same cravings). I mean more fundamental changes. Quite likely video will get more customizable, building on TikTok’s legacy of turning us all into creators; why watch when you can dance?
Hollywood stories in such a world will exist, but malleably. Online video will be not our smoothest Blinding Lights moves but AI-enabled personalized stories, in which we can choose to sculpt the script (or creator) plot turns the way we want, as the smart companies in Hollywood and Silicon Valley figure out to give this to us. This will create its own form of cognitive impatience, making us restless watching anyone else’s version of a story. At least TikTok had many of us viewing the same 20-second bites. In the newer world, no teeth marks will look the same.
The future of entertainment is perennially uncertain, and anyone who says they have has the answers is lying. But anyone who discounts what TikTok had done to the business and our brains also isn’t telling the truth. Video consumption now looks nothing like it did five years ago, just as video consumption in 2030 will itself be unrecognizable to our present selves. No act of Hollywood or Congress can defeat the algorithm.
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