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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?
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?
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.
What researcher said this? Who did they interview? I don't want my entertainment to sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"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...
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.
I'll assume these are the types who also think sex is better in ff mode
I would prefer a plugin that removed bullshit to save time as opposed to just speeding up the bullshit.
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I have a ridiculous idea. What if we could somehow encode messages visually and allow people to scan them with their eyes at their own pace? Perhaps even substantial bodies of linguistic information could be spread by these means. But surely that's a pipe dream...
Ezekiel 23:20
Just don't watch it at all.
If it's not entertaining at normal speed, it's not entertaining at any speed.
It's entertainment. Efficiency is pointless.
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.
I don't ever watch tv, but I do watch a lot of youtube. Anything that has a lot of action, like video game videos, or anything that involves normal human interaction, watch on normal speed. For sure.
I also, however, watch a lot of content that is really just a face talking to the camera. Someone conveying informatipn by talking. I watch a lot of these videos at 1.25x and 1.5x speed. Occasionally when there is a video that isn't super interesting and I'm more scanning it, 2x speed. I'd really like if youtube also had a 1.75x speed. Knowing that there are addons to do this is very attractive to me.
Most of us need some down time. You choose riding a high horse as your hobby to kill time, not all of the rest of us did. Out of curiosity, how much time per day do you waste on slashdot?
30 comments and no one's brought up Blipverts yet? What is this world coming to... >.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Or just read the books at any speed you like.
"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."
He's just off his Adderall, that's all.
One-thousand times no.
I work in tech and routinely watch technical content. Mostly videos from conferences, meetups, howtos, etc. I do it at 1.5x most of the time, sometimes 2x. This is because I am looking for interesting (to me) bits such as interesting (novel, unorthodox, etc) solutions or just want to quickly rehash key points of things I haven't dealt with in a while. It saves me time and I still can accomplish what I set out to. What is wrong with my approach? Care to elaborate?
There is nothing wrong with your approach, but consider for a moment that your examples are related to work and finding interesting pieces of a longer whole.
If you go to the cinema for the latest Avengers movie and you're only interested in the fight scenes anyway, why not just wait for the DVD so you can pick those out at your leisure?
This is about speeding up entertainment, but to me it sounds like the researcher is going to end up stressing himself out needlessly. I don't know about the rest of the world, but if I sit down to watch a movie I do so to relax and unwind, not sit at the edge of my seat afraid to blink in case I'll miss something.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Its fine by yourself but it's in fucking intolerable when someone else is the one moving back and forth and varying the speed
You can't read books at any speed you like. Some authors write slower than others.
It did require some modifications to the space-time continuum, but I can now waste 26 hours 44 minutes and 16.9 seconds on Slashdot every day.
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...
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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!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
If the story is so disengaging that you want to speed it up then it says a lot about the story and character development. Sounds to me like it is the same thing wrapped up in "different" shows. Once you realize that all the story does is climb up and down Maslow's hierarchy of needs over and over they all become very predictable.
Personally I prefer a good story told well that is engaging enough to not want to slow it down, I am just looking for some down time. On the other hand my friend's autistic son watches up to five videos all at the same time, so maybe he can see these shows in another way, i.e. the same story with lots of different pictures all at once.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
But do you really want to watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture's first hour at normal speed?
I've always felt like one of the big advantages reading has over other sorts of media is that it's intrinsically rate-limited. The problem with this technology (and it's a problem that might be overcome at some point) is that it's not dynamic. There are some times, in some shows, where I *do* want to speed it up without losing information, while there are other times when I need to pause and say "WTF just happened, and how does it relate to everything else int the show, or the universe, or my life, or what have you?"
To me, this seems like it might be an evolution of fast-forward. Traditional fast-forward cut out sound, so if you were information-input-starved, that was actually a worse option. I've tried video time-compression, and it didn't work well for me, but I think that's more likely because it was all-or-nothing and was still at a fixed rate that might not be exactly right. Maybe what's needed is a button that says "for the next N seconds (maybe 15?), accelerate slowly, then decelerate back to normal speed", and you can hit that button at a rate that lets you process what you're seeing at a comfortable rate. Of course, the problem with a button like that is that it would completely tear marriages asunder and generally make watching video with company torture for most of the people watching. You'd have to adopt a paradigm like hiking, where the leader should be the slowest person, so as to make sure no one is left behind. And I can think of few party games less fun than "give the remote to the slowest thinker".
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
Naaa, that is old tech. Nobody in their right mind uses that today. It is sooo outdated and you need several years to learn how to do it too. And in addition, it requires you to think about it yourself because you have to reconstruct your own version of what is happening form a tiny, slow data-stream. And not only that, it may even require you to think about things because it does not show you everything. Thinking and understanding are skills that are fast becoming obsolete (just look at this story), and you do not want to be bogged down by old skills that nobody wants anymore, do you? It is really astonishing that "reading" ever had any people doing it by choice.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
True that. I did the first one once by accident and it was quite fun, but ultimately very expensive.
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.
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.
I only read your last paragraph
Alfred Hitchcock was known as the "master of suspense" precisely because he avoided chopping the scene to pieces with a million different camera angles.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Totally agree, which is why I'll read/skim a dozen text pages before clicking on a YouTube "HowTo" that is clearly labeled as being "exactly what I'm looking for."
Once in a great while, it's nice to kick back and watch somebody do a technical walkthrough of something I'm interested in... I especially like the tools demonstrations where they take you through from ground zero through getting all the tools you need, showing you how the tools are used, and completely doing the job on the video - this could be for cars, software tools, construction, or whatever. But, that's mostly for entertainment, when I'm actually doing the job, a page of procedural text is usually more useful than 30 minutes of instructional/demonstration video.
...you might learn something new about yourself.
Happiness is slavery.
Fans of closed platforms like iOS and game consoles would agree.
Do you realize that just a hundred and fifty years we abolished actual slavery, fighting an incredibly bloody war in the process, where one person could own another person as actually property? Yes, I like open platforms too, but damn, if my Xbox gets all tyranical-like, I can throw it in the garbage and stop paying Microsoft $60 a year. Let's not get carried away with hyperbole.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
So are the movies.
Most podcasts i listen to are about science or philosophy where i find i cannot/ dont want to speed up at all, since the material is so dense that i need to contemplate while listening. I rewind a few seconds very often. If i listen too quickly i zone out, or find afterwords that i cannot recapilate to myself what was just presented to me. A great way to make sure you understood it is to summerize it in text after lidtening. If you cannot, the what was the point in listening in the first place? I can listen to Audiobooks at a quicker pace, depending on the reader and how complicated the plot is, usually i do that if the presenter talks glacially slow.
I had some time in hospital, so I bought the first 4 seasons of The Walking dead and watched them through.
I watched the first season in real time, that was ok. For the second season, things just went too slowly, so I watched it on 2x.
After that, I watched all of the remaining series in 2x. Far better pacing. I know that the show likes to set the atmosphere and be slow, but it was too slow for me. At 2x speed, it was perfect.
Occasionally, I had to go back and watch a scene in normal speed again, but that wasn't too often.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
Even a 30 minute TV show episode ends up being 15 or 16 minutes after you cut out the commercials and the opening and closing credits.
I don't watch in fast forward I just skip the intros, credits, commercials and keep half my time.
" 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.
Got caught up on the whole 50 hours of the first 5 seasons by watching it on double-speed during my morning workouts.
I taped a 20-minute workout and played it back at high speed on my machine so it only took ten minutes. I got a great workout.
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