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

His Girl Friday

[jader3rd]

I believe that "His Girl Friday" still holds the record for the most amount of words per minute, than any other movie. I don't believe that movie would possibly be more enjoyable at a faster speed.

I can think of a few better plugins

[jimbob6]

I would prefer a plugin that removed bullshit to save time as opposed to just speeding up the bullshit.

Re:TiVo

[jedidiah]

MythTV has also had this kind of fast forward feature for years and years. It never occured to me to even try it. I found the lack of commercials to be rewarding enough. Take those out and you can already watch "more stuff".

This is actually really old tech that hasn't really seemed to catch on.

If you're itching to turn on some sort of fast-forward mode then you're clearly watching the wrong thing. There's really no need for anyone to subject themselves to something they don't really want to watch. Not in this day and age.

Solution

[fluffernutter]

I know a way that you can consume any content at the pace you want to. It's called READING. Maybe too many videos are being made when there should just be an article. Maybe kids aren't learning well enough how to skim for a topic or word and start reading from that point.

Re: most people already prefer listening to accele

[Dogtanian]

Truth to be told I *hate* movies longer than 90 mins.

I thought I was the only one. If I'm doing something else, it's not so bad, but to sit on my backside and watch a film for two hours?

Okay, to be fair, even 90 minutes is pushing it for me. It's not so much that my attention span has got worse in recent years- it probably has- but that I realised I never really had the patience to sit down for an extended period and watch a film.

So maybe it's just me... :-)

The General

[Ecuador]

Actually, there are good things that are better accelerated as well, and some silent movies come to mind. For example I was re-watching one of my favorite silent films, Buster Keaton's "The General" on DVD and I found out that PowerDVD (this was at around 2003) could play back 25% faster with sound, which made the film even funnier!

Re:Modern Family

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

I find it is incredibly useful from content that is deliberately trying to induce a strong enough emotional response to override the logical portion of the brain. Politicians and product reveals are the #1 thing I would like in a condensed (transcripted preferably) format.

OTOH content where I deliberately want my disbelief suspended, I wouldn't speed up, it would be defeating the point.

Re:No

[MDMurphy]

Short version No for me too.

I sort of did this years ago when I had a TiVo. It didn't speed up voice, but if I turned on closed captions I could get through the last bit of a show before I had to leave somewhere by selecting a mild FF setting and reading the words rather than listening to them. In a similar vein, when I used to watch "Survivor" I'd FF through the BS drama and just watch the challenges. If something referred to an event I'd skipped I'd just go back and check it out.

In some way I think I've embraced the too-slow-for-me pace of TV by reading while watching most shows. Before the web I used to grab a magazine or two before settling down to watch TV for the evening. With live TV it was the magazine you paused when the TV demanded more attention, with recorded TV either can pause to make way for the other. (Living alone is necessary for this )

I have the option to speed up audiobooks but never do it. I appreciate the zen state I can get into when listening. I've come up with new patent ideas or work solutions while listening to a book. At times I'll realize that my mind wandered and I'd been ignoring the book, but that's ok, it's part of the process and I can always rewind and find my place. I think if I sped things up I'd miss the "thinking" part of the experience.

What would scare me about watching all TV sped up is that I'd get used to it. The guy in the article said he finds regular speed TV or going to a movie excruciating since it goes by too slow. What about listening to other people talk? There's already people who go on for too long and if I was used to a sped up world they would be even more difficult to deal with.

So I'll pass on the sped up video and audiobooks for now. I've already found ways to fill in the empty space by reading and thinking. I'd also be too worried about the real world feeling too slow and boring.

Re:Modern Family

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

never mind when the scene has to wait for the canned laughter to die down.

Many of the laugh tracks you hear today were recorded in the 40's and 50's, which means that a lot of the people you hear laughing in them are dead now.

It always seems a bit surreal to me to to hear these dead people still laughing.

Re: most people already prefer listening to accele

[Jhon]

" Instead I just fast-forward through the predictable boring scenes -- skip 5 minutes of scenic driving here, 2 minutes of overhead establishing shot there, 10 minutes of chopsocky fight scene, upwards of 15 minutes of characters agonizing over some trivial emotional trainwreck that doesn't advance the plot... I can easily see a movie or TV episode in half the production time just by skipping past the filler scenes that I don't care about."

Isn't that akin to looking at a piece of art, say the Mona Lisa, but at postage stamp size?

Don't get me wrong -- you are entitled to watch a movie any way you want. I'll continue watching TV/Movies as they were intended rather than some self-imposed cliff's notes version.

BTW, I feel the same way about books. I have what I call a few "useless superpowers". One of which is an ability to read incredibly fast. I have found that if I slow down my reading to that of the spoken word I ENJOY the material much much more. Passages which would MAYBE get me to smile reading at full speed will get a loud belly laugh. The downside is I finish a book in 20 hours vs. 30 mins -- I can live with that. It's about ENJOYING the material -- not how fast I can get through it.