The article mostly complains about the decline of shopping malls. The real takeaway is that entertainment has spilled everywhere, and every space has to be redesigned to compete with your couch.

The entertainment company’s new “Netflix House” experience is bringing the brand’s shows into former department stores. Will streaming TV fans follow?

You can spot the telltale red hue from several parking lots away as you approach the mall. Netflix Red — the color millions of Americans see each night before dozing off — is splashed on the side of the King of Prussia mall in the Philadelphia suburbs. It marks the portal to Netflix House, the streaming entertainment company’s new permanent brand activation/movie theater/retail outlet, which opened last month.

The 100,000-square-foot space, built from the bones of a shuttered Lord & Taylor department store, is the first of three Netflix Houses launching in US cities. The second opened this week in the former Belk department store anchoring the Galleria Dallas mall in Texas. A Las Vegas shopping center called BLVD Las Vegas is set to get its own version in 2027.

Ever since Netflix started mailing out movies on DVDs in the late 1990s, the entertainment company has been dreaming up ways to keep people sitting on their couches, watching stuff. Its red envelopes helped sound the death knell for the neighborhood video store, and the launch of its video streaming service in 2007 heralded the frictionless age of TV-by-internet. Now Netflix has more than 300 million subscribers — and is aiming to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. for $83 billion in the hopes that its enormous catalog will bring in even more.

But recently Netflix has also been investing in things that get people off their screens and buying stuff in the real world. Earlier this year, the company mounted an ambitious Stranger Things spin-off play on Broadway, earning respectful reviews and a few Tony awards. In 2022, Netflix took a live Bridgerton-themed experience on the road, luring fans of the Shonda Rhimes show set in the Victorian era to ballrooms from Los Angeles to Montreal. (The events also inspired a famously lackluster copycat pop-up in Detroit.) And after Netflix released the zombie movie Army of the Dead in 2021, the company set up a zombie-fighting virtual-reality experience in Beverly Hills.

These kinds of events laid the groundwork for Netflix House, says Greg Lombardo, who heads live experiences for the company. The brick-and-mortar outposts are meant to help the streaming giant extend the lives of its most popular shows after the credits roll. “If you’re a fan of Stranger Things — if you love that show — you could watch that entire season in a weekend,” he said. “And then the question is, now what?”