Is The Future Of Television Watching on Fast-Forward? (washingtonpost.com)

The average American watches three hours of TV each day, and researchers have found that most people already prefer listening to accelerated speech. "After watching accelerated video on my computer for a few months, live television began to seem excruciatingly slow..." writes the Washington Post's Jeff Guo. "Movie theaters feel suffocating. I need to be able to fast-forward and rewind and accelerate and slow down, to be able to parcel my attention where it's needed..." Slashdot reader HughPickens.com distills some interesting points from Guo's article: You can play DVDs and iTunes purchases at whatever tempo you like, and a Google engineer has written a popular Chrome extension that accelerates most other Web videos, including on Netflix, Vimeo and Amazon Prime. Over 100,000 people have downloaded that plug-in, and the reviews are ecstatic. "Oh my God! I regret all the wasted time I've lived before finding this gem!!" one user wrote.

According to Guo speeding up video is more than an efficiency hack. "I quickly discovered that acceleration makes viewing more pleasurable. "Modern Family" played at twice the speed is far funnier -- the jokes come faster and they seem to hit harder. I get less frustrated at shows that want to waste my time with filler plots or gratuitous violence. The faster pace makes it easier to appreciate the flow of the plot and the structure of the scenes."
Guo writes that "I've come to believe this is the future of how we will appreciate television and movies. We will interrogate videos in new ways using our powers of time manipulation... we will all be watching on our own terms." Will this eventually become much more common? How many Slashdot readers are already watching speeded-up videos?

Comments

Modern Family

[Fwipp]

"I quickly discovered that acceleration makes viewing more pleasurable. "Modern Family" played at twice the speed is far funnier -- the jokes come faster and they seem to hit harder.

Well maybe, but you didn't exactly pick a show worth watching in the first place...

Re:Modern Family

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Well maybe, but you didn't exactly pick a show worth watching in the first place...

Maybe he meant that a shitty show watched at double speed improves the shit vs. time metric, or something. I dunno.

As for me, if something sucks, I don't want to watch it at all, let alone at double speed. But of course I'm out of touch with what the cool kids are up to these days.

Re:Modern Family

[Mr D from 63]

Maybe selective speeding would be a good thing, like in documentary style tv shows where they feel the need to 'catch you up' after every commercial break. Speeding through those parts would increase my viewing pleasure.

Re:Modern Family

[dwillden]

Or the Documentaries and reality TV shows that rehash everything covered to that point after every commercial break.

Re:most people already prefer listening to acceler

[JoeMerchant]

Pitch correctors mostly remove the chipmunk effect.

Personally, I don't need to consume entertainment at high speed, the point of entertainment for me is to enjoy a stretch of time, not to consume a quantity of media. If I consume less media, I don't feel less entertained.

Even faster:

[Kohath]

Just don't watch it at all.

The wrong solution to the wrong problem.

[taustin]

If it's not entertaining at normal speed, it's not entertaining at any speed.

It's entertainment. Efficiency is pointless.

Re:The wrong solution to the wrong problem.

[AthanasiusKircher]

If it's not entertaining at normal speed, it's not entertaining at any speed.

Agreed. This seems like someone listening to pop music on fast forward. Why? Just choose a better song you actually like better.

Just like music, film and TV has a "rhythm" and a temporal "feel." If you speed it up, you mess with that rhythm, which the director (and editor, etc.) worked so hard to create. Unless the TV show or film is already bad, it probably won't be improved by tampering with its fundamental design.

Re:I watch at 2x or more speed...

[myowntrueself]

The most interesting thing about LOTR is the dialogs. If LOTR is just a dumbed down action movie for you then I just can feel sorry for you.

Well I did read the books. Once. The dialog was boring as hell in them as well. Or is page after page of the word 'ere' being used several times per sentence and genealogy the point of the story?

The action was the only good thing about those movies, they were grossly padded out. The trilogy would have made a decent 90 minute movie.

Re:most people already prefer listening to acceler

[vux984]

Not all videos are about entertainment.

Bingo. If its NOT entertainment, I'd rather not watch it at all, and just read a transcript.

The only reason I fast forward video is that it has shitty information density, and 99.9% of all video is extremely poorly bookmarked to facilitate you getting to the part you want.

For example, youtube... you find an album, and then there are usually time code links to each track.

All instructional, walkthru, tutorial, informational, educational etc videos should have that list:

0:00 - pointless intro
0:15 - i introduce myself for far too long
1:35 - i introduce the topic for far too long
2:54 - i chatter about something and irrelevant
3:05 - this is what you came to see
3:17 - i chatter about my other videos
5:02 - something else random
5:20 - pointless outtro

Then i can click on the 5th link, watch 20 seconds and move on. Better still would be a transcript under each section, so if I get what i need from skimming the transcript, I don't even need to watch the video.

Better still, lose the rest of video elements entirely, and replace with a brief text. And only have the 20 second clip that I might need.