The upstart tech executive believes people will continue to click on their videos.

“It’s really about being addictive,” he said, noting how consuming content on his company’s platform can keep you “obsessed.” While many companies are trying to master this new era of compulsive viewing, the executive believes no one has found the secret. "I don't know at all whether our specific competitors are actually emerging," he said.

That executive was Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, who in 2013 NPR Market as Orange is the new black Dropped on the service. There are still three years until TikTok is launched.

You'd be forgiven for thinking these remarks apply to the viral video app, which over the past five years has become the Pringles of digital viewing: Once it goes viral, you can't stop it. What Netflix once did to Hollywood—leverage algorithms to make videos irresistible—TikTok does the same to Netflix. Probably permanent.

TikTok's future in the United States remains unclear. After a brief outage on Saturday night, it was back on track Sunday morning as the company hinted that incoming President Donald Trump would sign an executive order delaying the ban. With the Supreme Court unanimously upholding a congressional law forcing ByteDance's owners to sell to a non-Chinese company, its long-term fate is unclear.

But don't be distracted by the Washington soap opera. Whether TikTok can hold out for many years or rise to the challenge of cellular in the air, it will have won a traditional entertainment game before it's too late.

Netflix-style streaming was once considered a great innovator, creating a new form of immersive viewing, with eight-hour arcs that made you forget about the outside world. But what technology gives, technology takes away. It turns out that binge-watching is just one link in a long chain. Following closely behind is TikTok. Forget eight-hour arcs; you can now watch 80 videos in an hour. They all seemed to be scratching an itch.

While the app is new, it continues a TV trend that has made video storytelling a participatory sport dating back to the 1980s, when shows including hill street blues and twin peaksIt creates an addictive, immersive experience in a way that television has rarely done before. This trend follows e.g. The Sopranos and survivor In the early 2000s, it gave way to the streaming culture of the 2010s. Each time, providers are making their stuff harder to turn off, and content and technology are increasingly coming together to make viewing a forced leisure choice.

TikTok is following the tradition, one broccoli haircut at a time and Khaby Lame getting cheeky. When you watch one video you have to watch another, the algorithm knows how to hook us, just like David Chase once knew how to hook us.

Of course what has changed is the content of the hook. While the storytelling of the Hollywood era was long, polished, and focused, the storytelling of the TikTok era is the opposite—brief, disjointed, and mostly scattered. if The Sopranos and crowThe five-course dinner is a comforting treat that comes once every season, and the TikTok is the McDonald's burger we can always munch on and crave for another.

McDonald's always wins.

Part of the reason for this is financial. TikTok has twice as many subscribers as Netflix in the United States (about 170 million) because its content base is less expensive to build. Professional acting is expensive. Relying on everyone submitting a video isn't the case.

But the bigger factor is culture. When you can create the videos you're watching, you'll naturally be more invested. TikTok videos are made by people like us, and unlike in the celebrity era, they are real Just like us. Sometimes, if we deign to post something, it actually is us. (For more on TikTok’s impact on creator culture, check out this great article.)

The idea of ​​watching shorter periods of time also quickly became a necessity - yes, for young people without the muscle memory, but for the rest of us too. There is strong evidence that TikTok has changed our biology. A study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging tests to measure brain activity found that heavy use of the app, whose funny videos always seem to be accompanied by another video we want, actually activated parts of the brain related to attention span part, and subsequently lowered it in turn. TikTok didn’t just change the paradigm. It really reshapes our thinking.

Most in Hollywood are either turning a blind eye to this attack or doing nothing about it, at best using TikTok to try to market its content, which is a bit like trying to promote your horse-drawn service next to a Model T. (As misleading as Quibi was, one thing was right: It was a savvy attempt to bring the spirit of TikTok into traditional Hollywood, combining the values ​​of serial storytelling with the clickability of short films. It turns out to be a recipe but Jeffrey Katzenberg got it right.)

Of course, that doesn't mean there won't be some great TV series to tempt us in the coming years. But the idea of ​​traditional episodic TV's place in the commercial and cultural landscape - where the products of writers' rooms and week-long shoots are the first choice for what we watch on digital screens - is becoming increasingly marginalized. .

Then again, TikTok isn’t the end of the chain either. More links will be added, and I don't mean that Meta, Substack, and YouTube are currently trying to imitate TikTok (although in the short term they will satisfy the same desire). I mean more fundamental changes. Videos will likely become more customizable, continuing TikTok's legacy of turning us all into creators; why watch when you can dance?

Hollywood stories in such a world would exist, but be malleable. Online videos will not be our smoothest “dazzling lights” action, but AI-powered personalized stories in which we can choose to shape the script (or creator) plot the way we want it, just like in Hollywood and Silicon Valley Smart companies came up with that for us. This creates its own kind of cognitive impatience, making us restless as we watch other people’s versions of their stories. At least TikTok allowed a lot of us to watch the same 20-second clip. In the new world, no teeth marks will look the same.

The future of entertainment will always be uncertain, and anyone who claims they have the answers is lying. But anyone who underestimates what TikTok is doing to businesses and our brains is also not telling the truth. Video consumption today will look nothing like it did five years ago, just as video consumption itself in 2030 will be unrecognizable to our current selves. No action by Hollywood or Congress can defeat the algorithm.