You have room for ——

Two dials, and the small one wins

There are only two things on this page you can move: how long you expect to be around, and what you give it in a week. The second one sounds far too small to matter against the first. It is not, and the line below is straight for the same reason — nothing about this gets harder the further up you go.

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Every decade on the list is the same size

Nothing in this arithmetic decays. A week at sixty-eight holds as many hours as a week at twenty-eight, so each full decade below runs exactly as long as the one above it. If there is a short bar at all it is the tail end of the decade you are standing in — the only one you have already spent part of.

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What one show costs out of the whole thing

Here is the reason the number at the top is worth having. A long-running series is not long in the abstract; it is long as a fraction of what you have got. The right-hand column is the same commitment counted in the way you will actually feel it, which is weeks of your life at the pace you just typed in.

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The hour that buys nothing, and then buys everything

Another page here spends a weekend and finds that adding an hour to it usually changes nothing, because a season is twelve episodes whether you have time for eleven or not. Both things are true. One hour is smaller than the thing you are trying to fit; the same hour, every week, is bigger than any show ever made.

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Where these numbers come from

1. A season is twelve episodes of twenty-four minutes, so 4.8 hours. That is the standard broadcast cour, and it is the unit this whole page counts in. A half-hour slot in Japan carries about twenty-four minutes of programme; the rest is advertising a streaming service will never show you. Films are counted flat at two hours.
2. Fifty-two weeks a year, every year, with nothing taken off. Hours left is the years between your age and the line you picked, multiplied by fifty-two, multiplied by your hours a week. No holidays, no busy Novembers, no year where you watch nothing at all. This is the ceiling, not a forecast.
3. Seasons are rounded down and the remainder is thrown away. Eleven episodes of a twelve-episode show is not a season, so the figure at the top is the number of whole ones. This is also why an extra hour tonight buys nothing and an extra hour a week buys hundreds — the rounding only bites once.
4. The line you pick is not a prediction about you. Eighty is on the buttons because it is a round number near the life expectancy of a rich country, not because anything here knows anything about you. Move it and every number on the page moves with it, proportionally, which is the most useful thing it can show you.
5. Nothing decays, and that is the surprising part. The arithmetic gives a week at seventy-five exactly the same weight as a week at twenty-five. Real watching is not like that. Read the decade bars as what the calendar allows, then discount the far ones yourself by however much you believe.
6. An hour a week against ten more years is a straight comparison. One is worth fifty-two hours a year for the remaining years; the other is worth five hundred and twenty hours at your current pace. Which wins depends only on your pace and how many years you have left, and the page says which one it is for the numbers you typed.
7. Rewatching, dropping and falling asleep are all outside this. So is the time spent choosing. If you drop one show in three an hour in, the real figures are lower than these by about that much, and nothing on this page will tell you so.