I like television.
This feels important to establish before the defence rests, the prosecution begins, or somebody accuses me of wanting Britain returned to three channels, a test card and the national anthem before closedown.
I like a good drama. I like disappearing into a story for several hours and emerging mildly surprised that it has become dark outside. I like binge-watching, despite the small ceremony of self-deception that accompanies it:
Just one more episode.
One more cliffhanger.
One more cup of coffee that nobody needed.
I even like the weekly release.
I do not necessarily enjoy waiting patiently for it, but patience and enjoyment have never been quite the same thing. There is something valuable in anticipation: the conversations between episodes, the theories, the suspense and the sense that a story is being experienced alongside other people rather than consumed alone.
What I do not like is learning the plot, the ending and sometimes the narrative direction of the following season before the current season has even reached British screens.
I do not like being expected to remain excited about a programme that was shown in the United States twelve or eighteen months earlier, while entertainment pages, search engines, trailers, social media and news reports behave as though the story has long since become public property.
A character has died.
The mystery has been solved.
The cliffhanger has been explained.
The next season has already been written, filmed, promoted or cancelled.
The viewer is expected to arrive with fresh curiosity at a cultural event that the wider media has already attended, discussed and cleared away.
This is often presented as a minor inconvenience.
Avoid social media.
Do not read the article.
Scroll quickly past the headline.
Mute the programme title.
Treat ordinary participation in digital life as though it were a military exercise in information avoidance.
Yet the burden rests almost entirely upon the viewer.
The broadcaster delays the programme. The distributor divides the territories. The platform negotiates the rights. The entertainment press publishes the revelation. The algorithm promotes it.
Then the viewer is told that avoiding the spoiler was somehow a personal responsibility.
This is the first sleight of hand.
A commercial decision becomes an individual failure.
The system creates the conditions. The viewer is blamed for failing to navigate them.
The problem is not simply that television has become inconvenient. It is that the language of convenience now asks viewers to accept delay, fragmentation, surveillance, legal risk and weakened accountability as ordinary features of cultural life.
The Geography of Importance
Release delays do more than spoil entertainment.
They reveal a hierarchy of audiences.
Some viewers are treated as culturally current. Others are treated as secondary markets expected to arrive later, pay the same attention and somehow preserve the same excitement.
In a genuinely global media culture, that distinction becomes increasingly difficult to defend.
The programme may be promoted internationally. Its actors may appear across global media. Its official accounts may publish interviews, clips and announcements without meaningful regard for territorial release schedules. News organisations may discuss the ending because it has already aired somewhere.
The viewer, meanwhile, is asked to pretend that national licensing borders still protect the experience.
They do not.
The internet has no patience for regional scheduling. A plot twist crosses the Atlantic much faster than the programme itself.
The inequality is subtle because it is rarely called inequality.
It is described as distribution.
Licensing.
Windowing.
Territorial availability.
Commercial arrangement.
The language is neutral, almost antiseptic.
But beneath it sits a simple reality:
One audience is permitted to participate in the story as it unfolds.
Another is invited to purchase what remains after the cultural moment has passed.
The first audience receives participation.
The second receives access.
Those are not always the same thing.
The pattern appears in several forms: delayed releases that spoil participation, fragmented platforms that monetise unfinished attachment, public rules that make viewers responsible for legal compliance, and complaint systems that shrink structural problems into individual cases.
Twenty-Three Seasons of Loyalty
Consider NCIS.
A viewer may follow a programme for more than two decades. Characters arrive and depart. Relationships form. Teams change. Actors age alongside the audience. The series becomes less like a passing entertainment and more like a familiar room visited each year.
That is not merely viewing.
It is accumulated attention.
It is loyalty.
It is emotional and cultural investment.
Season 23 began in the United States on 14 October 2025 through CBS and concluded there on 12 May 2026. For British viewers, however, the practical problem was not simply the American release date but the uncertainty around where and when the latest season would be reliably available in the UK.1
Meanwhile, the series is distributed across Disney+, Paramount+ and platform bundles. Disney+ UK’s public programme page still describes the title’s release span as ending in 2024, while current availability listings identify several UK services without always making season-level availability immediately clear.2
The loyal viewer must become a researcher.
Which service holds which seasons?
Is the latest season available through Disney+?
Does Paramount+ carry it in the United Kingdom, or only elsewhere?
Does a Sky package include the relevant version of Paramount+?
Does an online listing refer to the programme generally or to the exact season being sought?
The programme has asked the viewer for twenty-three seasons of continuity.
The industry offers no comparable continuity in return.
The viewer’s commitment is expected to survive cast changes, schedule changes, platform changes and territorial delay.
The distributor’s commitment ends wherever the current licensing agreement ends.
One side is asked to remain loyal.
The other reserves the right to become unavailable.
The Story Is the Bait
Then there is the opposite experience: not decades of loyalty, but the rapid creation of attachment.
A platform offers the first season of a successful programme associated with a competing subscription service. The viewer begins watching. The characters become familiar. The mystery deepens. The season ends—and the continuation is somewhere else.
Cross, for example, is an Amazon Prime Video drama. Amazon describes seasons one and two as streaming exclusively on Prime Video. At the time of drafting, however, the author observed the first season presented within ITVX. That appearance should be documented with a dated screenshot before publication, because catalogue listings and platform integrations can change.3
That arrangement raises a larger question.
Is the viewer being offered a complete cultural work?
Or are they being introduced to a commercial dependency?
Here is enough story to create attachment.
Here is enough suspense to make incompleteness uncomfortable.
Here is enough access to make another subscription feel necessary.
The industry calls this choice.
But the choice has been engineered after attachment has already formed.
There is an important difference between choosing whether to begin a story and being commercially pursued through the need to finish one.
The first is preference.
The second is leverage.
Streaming has learned to monetise not only attention, but unfinished attachment.
The viewer is no longer simply paying to watch stories.
The viewer is being moved between platforms through curiosity, loyalty, suspense and emotional investment.
The story becomes the bait.
Incompleteness becomes the hook.
With Cross, attachment can be manufactured quickly.
With NCIS, decades of attachment can be taken for granted.
One says:
Begin the story here, then follow it elsewhere.
The other says:
Thank you for twenty-three seasons of loyalty. Please continue waiting.
In both cases, the viewer’s emotional continuity has commercial value.
The industry’s obligation to honour that continuity does not.
The Market of Locked Rooms
Streaming originally presented itself as liberation.
The schedule would no longer control us. We could watch what we wanted, when we wanted. The old gatekeepers were losing their power. Choice was expanding.
Some of that promise was real.
Streaming transformed access to television and film. It enabled long-form storytelling, introduced wider audiences to international productions and allowed people to watch around work, family, illness and ordinary life.
But liberation gradually became fragmentation.
The television package became several subscriptions.
Desirable programmes were scattered across competing services.
Sports, films, documentaries and dramas were separated into commercial territories, each requiring its own monthly payment.
The public living room became a corridor of locked doors.
Behind one door sits the programme everybody is discussing.
Behind another, the film you wanted to see.
Behind a third, the next season of the series you began elsewhere.
Behind a fourth, the sport that was previously available through an existing service.
Each door is described as choice.
Yet choice usually implies the freedom to select between complete alternatives.
Streaming increasingly offers something different:
The obligation to assemble a complete cultural life from incomplete services.
The viewer must subscribe, cancel, resubscribe, compare, remember—and search.
Sometimes the viewer must discover that the programme has moved again.
This is not freedom from the schedule.
It is unpaid administration.
The Disappearing Contract
The terms of the relationship can also change while the relationship continues.
A subscription rises in price.
Advertising appears within a paid service.
A lower tier is introduced, followed by restrictions designed to make it less comfortable.
Account-sharing rules change.
Programmes disappear.
A series begins on one platform and concludes elsewhere.
The viewer is expected to remain loyal to a service that offers no comparable loyalty in return.
The emotional contract is simple:
I will invest my money, time and attention if you provide reasonable continuity.
The commercial contract is different:
Availability may change.
Prices may rise.
Terms may be amended.
The programme that brought you here may leave without taking your attachment with it.
This is where mistrust begins.
Not because every company is behaving unlawfully, but because legality is a narrow measure of a relationship.
A platform may comply perfectly with its written terms while repeatedly undermining the expectations through which the customer entered the relationship.
The viewer is technically informed and practically powerless.
Consent exists somewhere inside the terms and conditions.
Trust exists nowhere at all.
You’re Not a Viewer
Commercial television knows what the viewer is worth.
The subscription payment is only the beginning.
Viewing habits reveal what holds attention, what creates impatience, what can be recommended next and what might persuade the customer to remain for another month.
The viewer becomes a retention figure.
An advertising profile.
A recommendation category.
A household.
A bundle of measurable preferences.
Some smart televisions use automatic content-recognition technology to identify what appears on the screen, including material viewed through external devices, unless the relevant tracking controls are disabled. The screen itself can therefore become part of the data economy surrounding the viewer.
Our attention is not merely observed.
It is cultivated, classified and sold.
In the streaming economy, the customer is not only the person buying the product.
The customer’s behaviour is also part of the product.
Or a Criminal
Public-service broadcasting appears to offer a different relationship.
The television licence belongs to an older idea: broadcasting as a shared cultural good, funded collectively rather than surrendered entirely to advertisers and shareholders.
That history matters.
The BBC is not simply Netflix with a royal charter and a fondness for period drama.
Public-service broadcasting has provided news, education, regional programming, cultural memory and forms of universal access that purely commercial systems may have little incentive to preserve.
But the modern viewer encounters this public principle through a peculiar legal boundary.
A television licence is required to watch or record programmes as they are shown live on any channel or live-streaming service—not only the BBC. It is also required for BBC iPlayer, including on-demand viewing. A licence is generally not required for purely on-demand viewing through services such as ITVX, Netflix, Disney+ or Amazon Prime Video, provided no live television is watched and BBC iPlayer is not used.
The person sitting on the sofa must therefore know not merely what they are watching, but how it is being transmitted.
Is it live?
Is it on demand?
Is it being viewed through BBC iPlayer?
Is it a live stream on YouTube, Amazon Prime Video or another online service?
Has a programme that appears within a streaming app crossed the boundary between on-demand content and live television?
The viewer has become their own compliance department.
Cross the commercial threshold and platforms want to know how your attention can be monetised.
Cross the licensing threshold without payment and the act can become a criminal offence.
You are not simply a viewer.
You are a commodity—or a potential criminal.
The Unequal Teeth of the System
The distinction is revealing because the system possesses clearer language and stronger teeth for unauthorised viewing than it does for the commercial exploitation of authorised viewers.
Watch television live without the required licence and the breach can be named.
Use BBC iPlayer without a licence and the rule is clear.
The system knows where the line is and what it calls the person who crosses it.
But divide a story between several subscriptions, delay it for eighteen months, use its first season as commercial bait and turn the viewer’s attachment into leverage—and the language becomes strangely gentle.
Commercial arrangement.
Territorial rights.
Platform exclusivity.
Market choice.
Content availability.
One is treated as wrongdoing.
The other is treated as innovation.
This does not mean the licence fee should simply disappear, nor that public-service broadcasting has no value.
It means the allocation of institutional force tells us something.
The system is better equipped to identify the individual who watches incorrectly than the corporation that constructs a manipulative viewing environment correctly.
The viewer’s infringement is criminalised.
The corporation’s manipulation is commercialised.
The point is not that every inconvenience should become a regulatory offence, or that every disappointed viewer deserves a legal remedy. It is that the modern viewing experience is shaped by decisions that are powerful, profitable and treated as nobody’s full responsibility.
Enter the Watchdog
At this point, a reasonable person might ask:
Where is the television watchdog?
Britain has regulators, complaint procedures and consumer-protection bodies. There are codes, standards and institutions presented as standing between the public and powerful organisations.
Ofcom regulates television, radio, telecommunications and parts of the on-demand media landscape. Under the Media Act 2024, the largest video-on-demand services are being brought within an enhanced framework focused on audience protection, harmful or offensive content, fairness and accessibility.
These protections matter.
Content can cause harm.
Accuracy matters.
Fairness matters.
Privacy and accessibility matter.
But much of the contemporary viewer’s frustration does not sit inside the programme.
It occurs around it.
It sits in the delay before the programme arrives.
It sits in the missing seasons.
It sits in the subscription required to continue.
It sits in the use of an opening season without responsibility for the conclusion.
It sits in changing catalogues and changing terms.
It sits in the widening distance between what a service promises emotionally and what it guarantees contractually.
The watchdog regulates what appears on the screen.
Much of the modern harm occurs around the screen.
The Complaint Becomes Smaller
Institutions have a remarkable ability to translate moral discomfort into administrative language.
The viewer says:
“This service encouraged me to invest in a story it could not allow me to finish.”
The system hears:
“Customer unable to locate subsequent seasons.”
The viewer says:
“I am paying more and now receiving advertising inside something I already purchased.”
The system hears:
“Subscriber dissatisfaction following a change of tier.”
The viewer says:
“This programme arrived so late that the entire narrative had already been exposed.”
The system hears:
“Territorial release schedules vary.”
The viewer says:
“After decades of loyalty, I still have no reliable access to the next season.”
The system hears:
“UK transmission date to be confirmed.”
Every translation makes the complaint smaller.
Corporate power becomes commercial arrangement.
Manipulation becomes marketing.
Exclusion becomes availability.
A breach of trust becomes dissatisfaction.
This is media minimisation.
The language does not necessarily lie.
That is what makes it effective.
It describes the event accurately enough to appear reasonable while removing the experience of power from the description.
The viewer’s complaint is heard, processed and reduced until it fits inside the organisation’s existing categories.
What cannot fit becomes invisible.
The Watchdog as Shock Absorber
Perhaps the modern watchdog is less like a guard dog and more like a shock absorber.
It stands between public frustration and corporate power.
But instead of transmitting the force upwards, it absorbs, classifies and dissipates it.
A complaint is acknowledged.
A reference number is issued.
A process begins.
An individual answer may eventually arrive.
Yet the profitable architecture that produced the complaint remains almost entirely untouched.
The same delay continues.
The same fragmented licences remain.
The same incomplete seasons attract viewers.
The same subscriptions multiply.
The system does not necessarily need to silence the complaint.
It only needs to process it without allowing it to become a challenge to the structure itself.
It Is Not Only Television
The pattern reaches far beyond the screen. It appears wherever consumers are given a complaints process but little power over the conditions that keep producing complaints.7
Energy has an ombudsman.
Water has consumer bodies.
Telecommunications has regulators and dispute-resolution services.
Banking has formal complaint routes.
Each institution is presented as a form of public protection.
They are there for the consumer.
They listen.
They investigate.
They resolve.
They protect.
Yet many consumers will recognise the strange experience of being listened to at length while the underlying relationship of power remains untouched.
An ombudsman may examine whether a particular bill was calculated correctly.
A regulator may investigate whether a provider followed its written procedure.
A complaint service may determine whether an individual customer should receive an apology or compensation.
These are not meaningless functions.
Individual remedies matter.
But they are not the same as confronting the commercial architecture that repeatedly creates the complaints.
A watchdog can be impartial and still be structurally toothless.8
It does not need to be corrupt.
It merely needs a remit narrower than the harm being experienced.
Sorry, That Was a Different Company
A company is bought, merged, renamed or absorbed.
The customer crosses the boundary.
The account remains.
The direct debit continues.
The data is transferred.
The product continues to be supplied.
The profitable relationship survives.
Then the complaint reaches backwards.
Suddenly continuity disappears.
“Sorry, that was a different company.”
It is one of the most useful sentences in modern corporate life.
The organisation can inherit the customer while disputing the customer’s history.
It may retain the commercial value of the relationship while locating responsibility within a previous supplier, former owner or vanished brand.
The revenue is continuous.
Accountability is fragmented.
Money crosses the corporate border with ease.
Responsibility is stopped at customs.
This is not a claim that every acquiring company legally inherits every liability of the organisation it purchases. Acquisitions, asset transfers and corporate structures differ.
The deeper question is about the experience imposed upon the customer.
From the consumer’s side, the relationship may never have ended.
The same home receives the energy.
The same mortgage is paid.
The same account number—or its replacement—continues to organise the relationship.
The consumer is transferred whole.
Responsibility arrives in pieces.
The corporation insists it is the same relationship when collecting the money and a different company when answering the complaint.
The Same Story
Streaming performs a version of the same manoeuvre through licensing.
A platform may use the recognition, reputation and opening season of a programme to attract the viewer.
It benefits from an audience and emotional attachment created around that story.
But when the viewer asks where the rest of it has gone, continuity suddenly dissolves.
Different rights holder.
Different distributor.
Different territory.
Different platform.
Nothing to do with us.
Yet it was sufficiently to do with them to use the beginning as bait.
The commercial benefit is continuous.
Responsibility for the viewer’s experience is fragmented.
Modern consumer harm often exists not within one organisation, but in the spaces created between organisations.
Each participant points toward the gap.
The platform points to the rights holder.
The rights holder points to the distributor.
The broadcaster points to the schedule.
The regulator points to its remit.
The complaint service points to the terms.
Everyone may be procedurally correct.
The viewer remains abandoned in the middle.
Belonging to Whom?
This leaves a quieter question beneath the contracts, subscriptions and complaint forms.
To whom does the viewer belong?
To the platform while the payment remains active?
To the rights holder while the programme is profitable?
To the advertiser when attention is being sold?
To the BBC when the licence is due?
To the regulator when content breaches a code?
To nobody when the complaint exists between separate remits?
Corporations are eager to claim the consumer’s value.
The viewer is a subscriber, a customer, a user, an account, a household, a target audience and a data point.
The state may claim the viewer’s obligation.
The platform may claim the viewer’s attention.
The advertiser may claim the viewer’s profile.
Yet when the experience fractures, the person disappears between these identities.
The customer is commercially claimed and institutionally orphaned.
Perhaps this is the deeper inequality within modern television.
It is not only that some people can afford more platforms than others, although that matters.
It is also that the relationship itself is unequal.
The viewer is expected to offer continuity:
Monthly payments.
Attention.
Loyalty.
Data.
Emotional investment.
Legal compliance.
The institution reserves the right to offer discontinuity:
Changing prices.
Shifting catalogues.
Incomplete stories.
Territorial delays.
Corporate transfers.
Fragmented responsibility.
One side must remain available.
The other may disappear behind its terms.
Who Is the Watchdog Watching?
The question is therefore larger than whether streaming has become expensive or irritating.
It is whether consumer protection has slowly become consumer management.
The viewer is given somewhere to complain, but not necessarily somewhere from which the system can be meaningfully challenged.
The watchdog listens, but may have no power to bite.
The regulator examines the content while the commercial design of viewing remains largely beyond reach.
The platform supplies enough access to secure attention, but not enough responsibility to protect trust.
Everyone performs their narrow role.
Nobody claims the complete experience.
Society creates the dependency.
Power controls the relationship.
Responsibility is fragmented.
Belonging becomes conditional.
The corporations keep the profits.
The watchdog keeps the complaint.
The consumer keeps the consequence.
And somewhere, on another platform, the next season has already begun.
Evidence and verification notes
Sources checked 30 July 2026. Streaming catalogues are volatile; programme-availability claims should be rechecked on the day of publication. The notes support factual statements, while the essay’s interpretation remains the author’s argument.
1. NCIS season 23 dates
CBS episode guide: season 23 opened on 14 October 2025 and the twentieth episode, identified as the season finale, aired on 12 May 2026. Source
2. NCIS UK availability
Disney+ UK’s public title page currently gives the programme’s release span as 2003–2024; JustWatch UK lists the series across Disney+, Paramount+ and related channels but does not make the newest-season position clear in its general listing. Source
Additional availability check: JustWatch UK, checked 27 July 2026. Source
3. Cross ownership and exclusivity
Amazon’s March 2026 programme guide states that seasons one and two are streaming exclusively on Prime Video. The claimed ITVX appearance is therefore treated as a dated author observation requiring a screenshot or archived listing, rather than as an independently verified permanent catalogue fact. Source
4. Smart-TV viewing data
The ICO defines automatic content recognition as technology that can capture displayed content, match it against a library and collect viewing-habit information. In June 2026 it said connected TVs can collect what people watch and when, and announced engagement with manufacturers over transparency and consent. Source
Connected-TV scrutiny: ICO announcement, 11 June 2026. Source
5. Television-licence rules
GOV.UK states that a licence is required for live television on any channel or service and for BBC iPlayer; it is not required for ordinary on-demand use of services such as Netflix and Disney+. Source
6. Ofcom and streaming
Ofcom says it regulates editorial content on UK on-demand programme services. Its May 2026 Tier 1 consultation proposed standards covering under-eighteens, harm and offence, crime, hatred and abuse, religion, due impartiality and accuracy, elections, fairness and privacy. A parallel consultation concerns accessibility. Both consultations close on 7 August 2026. Source
Accessibility code: Ofcom Tier 1 Accessibility Code consultation. Source
7. Complaint architecture beyond television
Ofcom states that it cannot resolve individual phone or broadband complaints; unresolved cases may go to independent ADR schemes. The Financial Ombudsman Service describes itself as a free alternative to the courts for resolving individual financial disputes. Source
Financial complaints: Financial Ombudsman Service—About us. Source
8. The limits—and real powers—of ombudsman systems
Telecom ADR bodies can order providers to fix problems and pay compensation, and accepted Financial Ombudsman final decisions bind firms. These powers support individual remedies; the essay’s narrower claim is that case resolution is not the same as changing the wider commercial architecture. Source
Binding financial decisions: Financial Ombudsman Service—How we resolve complaints. Source
Editorial distinction: Claims about dates, rules, regulatory remit and technology are sourced above. Phrases such as “media minimisation”, “watchdog as shock absorber”, “commercially claimed and institutionally orphaned”, and the wider conclusions about power and belonging are original analysis rather than statements made by the cited organisations.