Is The Future Of Television Watching on Fast-Forward? (washingtonpost.com) 296
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?
His Girl Friday (Score:4, Interesting)
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most people already prefer listening to accelerate (Score:3, Funny)
What researcher said this? Who did they interview? I don't want my entertainment to sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Re:most people already prefer listening to acceler (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Pitch correctors mostly remove the chipmunk effect.
Even better, is a speech to text converter, so that I can just read the transcript.
the point of entertainment for me is to enjoy a stretch of time, not to consume a quantity of media.
Not all videos are about entertainment.
Re: most people already prefer listening to accele (Score:2)
Exactly. I love watching online educational videos in FFW. Makes an hour video into a 30 minute breeze.
Re:most people already prefer listening to acceler (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: most people already prefer listening to accele (Score:5, Funny)
I only read your last paragraph
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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 f
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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.
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Agreed on entertainment, but for informational videos, a bit of a speed-up is really handy. The Team Treehouse site has nice material, and when you speed up the videos to 1.5x or so, you really feel like you're moving along.
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I didn't have a tv, but read bit on this (I was interested in the technology). So guess now public sentiment has flipped 180degrees? See, the advertisers really do know what's be for people in the long run. MTV did a great job in decreasing people's attention spans and therefor incapable of understanding
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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...
Re: most people already prefer listening to accele (Score:4, Interesting)
" 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.
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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.
Modern Family (Score:5, Insightful)
"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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Modern Family (Score:5, Insightful)
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And consider the time we would save by speeding through the commercials themselves.
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Re:Modern Family (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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People used to share edited down versions of Mythbusters over Bittorrent. They were much more watchable because they took a 22 minute down, edited all the filler out and give you 10 minutes of interesting content.
On the other hand we have shows like Suits, where they pack a huge amount into every episode. When you stop to think for a moment it seems really silly, with people going from lowly intern to named partner at a law firm in the course of a few episodes. And even then there is a lot of filler.
Re:Modern Family (Score:4, Insightful)
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There's an edited set out there called Smyths that trims out all the "coming up" and "what you just missed" to show just the story without any redundancies. I've watched a few and found it very satisfying.
The General (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
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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!
That's also because The General is frankly one of the best movies of all time. It's fantastic. (Seriously, AFI listed it as #18 on its list of the best films of all time.) There are very few silent films on that list, and certainly none rival The General (except perhaps Chaplin's The Gold Rush).
The real test would be to see whether speeding up would make Griffith's Intolerance seem less intolerably long....
One issue (Score:2)
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I was going to do all that in caps and quote a bunch from They Live, but silly SLASHDOT accused me of YELLING.
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Whatever happened to Andre the Giant's posse? (Score:2)
OBEY.
Whom? I thought Andre the Giant didn't have a posse [wikipedia.org] anymore since he died back in 1993.
Happiness is slavery.
Fans of closed platforms like iOS and game consoles would agree.
Re:Whatever happened to Andre the Giant's posse? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Sex (Score:3, Funny)
I'll assume these are the types who also think sex is better in ff mode
Re:Sex (Score:5, Funny)
My fellow chrono-Americans may remember the "William Tell Overture" scene in A Clockwork Orange. The est if you can ask Gramps to play it on his VHS.
I can think of a few better plugins (Score:4, Interesting)
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I would prefer a plugin that removed bullshit to save time as opposed to just speeding up the bullshit.
You're so close. It's actually a plug. Follow that cable that goes from the TV to the power outlet on the wall. Remove plug from outlet. No more bullshit.
I watch at 2x or more speed... (Score:2)
Honestly, most TV and movies these days can be watched at 2x or greater speed.
I watched the whole Lord of the Rings series at 7x speed. I don't think I missed much, the dialog is meaningless drivel. I slow down for the action.
Re:I watch at 2x or more speed... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:I watch at 2x or more speed... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Or just read the books at any speed you like.
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You can't read books at any speed you like. Some authors write slower than others.
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The whole point is the characters and the dialog and the drama. "Action scenes" are the most boring part.
No, the whole point of LOTR was the history behind the story and the languages Tolkien invented.
Or are you just talking about Peter Jacksons attempts at making movies?
Even faster: (Score:5, Insightful)
Just don't watch it at all.
The wrong solution to the wrong problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's not entertaining at normal speed, it's not entertaining at any speed.
It's entertainment. Efficiency is pointless.
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+1
Sometimes the point of an activity is to have no point. After a full day of slinging transistors around, followed by power struggles with a 3 year old, I like some brainless downtime. The anti-TV crowd look down their nose at this, but eff them.
Re:The wrong solution to the wrong problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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If it's not entertaining at normal speed, it's not entertaining at any speed.
While that is true in most cases, In general, there are some exceptions [youtube.com].
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I can attest to the attraction of FF videos (Score:3)
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.
Works great for podcasts (Score:2)
I listen to podcasts at double speed and have gotten so used to it that they sound weird and slow if I play it at normal. The only time I have a problem is with people that are heavily accented or speak quickly normally.
That said this idea sounds stupid I can't imagine watching something at double speed.
Don't they some times alter the speed of film by a minor amount like one extra frame a sec or something to adjust long films to play in a certain amount of time? In addition to cutting scenes.
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I'm in the same boat. I listen to many audio podcasts and watch several video podcasts. For video, I found that 1.5x works best.....unless they are just "talking head" videos.....the visual component needs a little bit longer to process. Audio-only at 2x is very do-able. And this is for content that isn't just entertainment --- some of it includes "educational" content (loose definition --- not necessarily meaning academically).
Re: Works great for podcasts (Score:3)
Works for games (Score:2)
Film vs Someone reading shit for no fucking reason (Score:2)
Film or a TV Show has the potential to allow breathing space and pace for the watcher to absorb the information, use other dimensions of creative output and provide a space for the watcher to use their own imagination to unravel and impart their meaning on the story
The need to fast forward is stupid videos that could have been transcribed to text... either that or shit entertainment that isn't worth watching anyway.
Wither Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
30 comments and no one's brought up Blipverts [wikipedia.org] yet [tvtropes.org]? What is this world coming to... >.
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Re:Wither Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
TV stations would speed up programs to insert more commercials.
Would? They already DO! [consumerist.com]
Audio Books (Score:2)
I do this with audio books as standard practice. I'll typically increase the speed by 10-15%. That's fast enough to create a time savings, but not so fast as to make the book unpleasant. I can see the value in doing this with video, particularly since I'm usually binge-watching a show on Netflix when watching video.
"I hope you don't screw like you type." (Score:2)
Yes, sadly enough, even sex won't get the attention it deserves from the Vine generation.
Savor the moment will soon be an extinct concept, unworthy of understanding it's true value, all because it requires an attention span longer than a YouTube commercial.
I wonder how actors will feel as they're turned into helium-charged muppets on speed. Soundtracks mutilated by the FF button. The entire point of suspense and drama in a musical score deflated.
And we thought Photoshop was a shitty representation of rea
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It's a good point. It's somewhat akin to reading the "Cliffs Notes" of a book. Sure, you find out what happened, but you miss the art that is presented.
Granted, for a good deal of popular culture, "art" may be considered an overstatement.
Solution (Score:2, Interesting)
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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 yo
Attention span deficient (Score:2)
Guo needs to have their attention span broadened, and their choice of quality programming is also suspect.
The author and sex (Score:2)
I'm sure the author thinks the faster he has sex the more partners he can have.
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Depends on if they talk to one another.
What are you watching (Score:3)
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.
A new triumph for stupidity (Score:2)
It is _entertainment_! Making it last shorter is about the most stupid thing you can do with it. If you think it wastes your time, then do without it in the first place.
The heights of stupidity some people can reach is truly astonishing.
One of the benefits of reading (Score:3)
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".
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And I can think of few party games less fun than "give the remote to the slowest thinker".
We tried this game and now we have to leave Europe. Worst party eva, don't recommend it.
Tells more about our kind of entertainment (Score:2)
It seems that these people think that most of our movies and shows are filler and only a few interesting bits exist that they actually want to see.
And bluntly, with the average action movie, you could easily cut it by about 80% and not miss anything important.
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To be fair, but then on the other hand... (Score:2)
I've found that many of the recent "blockbuster" action movies (and not so recent, like Matrix {2,3}) are filled with filler and skimming loses nothing. How many people got bored 1/3 into any of the major action sequences in these movies because they were repetitious and/or added nothing to the story?
Certainly there are parts of TV episodes, movies, and books that can easily be skipped w/o losing anything important, but other parts may (should) have more to them than just the words spoken and actions tak
If you focus on quality rather than quantity... (Score:3)
...you might learn something new about yourself.
The Walking Dead - needs a speed up (Score:3)
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.
Re:TiVo (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I found the lack of commercials to be rewarding enough. Take those out and you can already watch "more stuff".
Yeah, that's the primary goal of my life: to be able to "watch more stuff". Going outside is for losers anyway.
After all, if I don't watch everything then I might miss that *awesome* sitcom joke and then my life would be diminished to the point of no return. On the other hand maybe I'll see it in my twittle feed or on my non-existent Facebork page. Maybe someone will post a screen cap to Instacram so I won't miss out. I can only hope...
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"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.
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MythTV has also had this kind of fast forward feature for years and years. It never occured to me to even try it.
Try half speed. It's hilarious.
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.
Not everything's entertainment. I watch the news at 125% of normal speed so I get through it faster and can get on to something else. Doesn't change the content one bit.
T.V. News (Score:2)
There's no news in that "news" anyway.
About 125% for new material. Or listen while drivi (Score:2)
I did a lot of studying via video. About 125% speed was pretty good for material I didn't already know, depending on the person presenting.
I switched to saving the audio to my phone and listening over my car speakers during my commute, at regular audio speed. I do turn it off when traffic requires my attention. In either a traffic jam or light traffic, I have the audio running. Between the commute and errands, that's almost an hour a day, so that's plenty of time to listen to a clip two or even three times.
Re:Who watches TV anyway? (Score:4)
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?
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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.
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You choose riding a high horse as your hobby to kill time, not all of the rest of us did.
I don't know about yours, but my horse does *not* like to ridden when he's high.
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Slashdot is just a spurtle that stirs the oatmeal already inside my head.
My cognitive processing pipeline requires a thickening stage. If not Slashdot, I'd have to find some other spurtle. Others prefer to give their quick oats a speedy zap in the microwave. Often, it shows.
At one level, it's completely ancillary to what
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Oh, be quiet, Mr. Green. [theonion.com]
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Condescend much?
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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?
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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
Re:No (Score:5, Funny)
But do you really want to watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture's first hour at normal speed?
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Its fine by yourself but it's in fucking intolerable when someone else is the one moving back and forth and varying the speed
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"You have not tried it"-Fallacy. I recommend you jump off a cliff, set yourself on fire and drink a bottle of cool-aid in order to find out why only utter morons use that non-argument.
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negative effect one's ability to pay attention
Neil Postman wrote a book about this, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business [wikipedia.org] . It is worth reading.
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I think TV actually makes things more dull. Video scenes go at a glacial speed compared to reading and leave out great many details (such as most if not all internal monologue). One can read for example Alice in Wonderland in about half-to-three quarters the time of the movie adaptations and in the process, obtain a lot more details about the motivations. A 'detailed' movie adaption of an average sized book should be split in two or three movies or even a TV show season.
Alfred Hitchcock (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)