Starting in the late 1940s, Journalists began using "marathon" in association with television events, according to archival research by media scholar Emil Steiner. "TV marathon" usages from 1949 to 1959 adhered to these categories: (1) Telethon, (2) Political Stunt/Punditry, (3) Lengthy Oratory, (4) Plus-Sized Show, (5) Plus-Sized Series, and (6) Plus-Sized Programming. “TV marathon” remained associated with live fundraising events through the early 1950s. This remained the most frequent journalistic usage of “marathon” until the 1980s, though the frequency really began falling in 1952, as journalists and style guides began using
telethon instead. The portmanteau saved typesetters between two and 10 letters per mention of the most common usage of “television/TV marathon.” While “movie marathon” appeared as early as 1948, journalists did not describe viewing them as “TV marathons.” Even when televised movie marathons began becoming common in the 1970s, journalists modified marathons by the content's original medium. Films and TV shows were separated, and journalists stuck to these six usages. “TV marathon” was used nearly 10 times more frequently than “TV binge” in English language periodicals from 1948 to 2011. Japanese
manga magazine
Weekly Shōnen Jump developed a successful formula of publishing individual manga chapters and then compiling them into separate standalone
tankōbon volumes that could be "binged" all at once. This
Jump formula produced major
Japanese pop culture hits such as
Dragon Ball (1984 debut),
One Piece (1997 debut) and
Naruto (1999 debut). According to Matt Alt of
The New Yorker, "
Jump presaged the way the world consumes streaming entertainment today." Marathon viewing sessions of Japanese
anime television series have been a common trend in
anime fandom for decades, dating back to the late 1970s to 1980s. According to an early American anime
cosplayer, Karen Schnaubelt, Japanese anime were "incredibly difficult to come by" with "nothing available except broadcast TV until"
VHS videotapes became commonly available in the late 1970s, allowing fans to import anime shows from Japan; she noted that a friend "would record the episodes" and then "a group of us would gather at his apartment and watch a marathon of the episodes." The idea by
Alan Goodman and
Fred Seibert was based on a similar concept that radio stations used, in which songs by one particular artist would be played for a prolonged period of time. A marathon may be used by a broadcaster to celebrate its acquisition of a specific series or film franchise (such as
FXX's "Every Simpsons Ever" marathon, which celebrated the channel's acquisition of the cable rights to
The Simpsons), and an online marathon of
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart held by
Comedy Central in 2015, which both featured the series' entire run), celebrate a milestone involving a long-running series, In a few cases, especially with classic television,
lost episodes, originally unseen
television pilots, and other programming that may not have been seen during the show's original run may be included. While many marathons were initially considered rare, special events, since the 2010s it has become common for some channels to structure their daily schedules into blocks devoted to specific programs (usually three-to-four hours in length), mainly to appeal to and compete with subscription
video-on-demand services (such as
Hulu and
Netflix) that have enabled voluntary "
binge-watching" of television series.
Free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) services often carry narrowly formatted linear channels that are devoted specifically to a single television series. Perks attributes the contemporary marathoning trend to three factors: advances in content-delivery technologies, active audience behaviors, and increasing complexity of storytelling. == Length ==