New York: So much media, so little time.
Consumers face a dizzying array of entertainment choices that include streaming video such as Amazon Prime Instant Video, Hulu and Netflix; cable channels and apps from outlets like HBO and Showtime; YouTube; and as many as 28,000 podcasts.
With them all offering uncountable hours of addictive programming, how is a listener or viewer supposed to keep up? For some, the answer is speed watching or speed listening — taking in the content at accelerated speeds, sometimes two times as fast as normal.
While speed viewing does save time — devotees said it can save hours over the season of a series — others raised concerns that it undermines the rhythm of a production and can dilute some creative elements.
Jan Rezab said in an article in Forbes last year that his viewing eventually progressed from 1.2 times to two times as fast. “As you continue to speed watch, higher speeds get easier and easier to comprehend,” he wrote. “I’ve been speed watching for the last two years, and I now feel comfortable watching at 2x the normal viewing speed.”
A clip of ‘Game of Thrones’ at 1.2 times was “indistinguishable from normal viewing speed” but was 20 per cent faster, he wrote. “If you started watching all your videos at 1.2x speed today, you’d immediately save more time and not lose any comprehension at all,” he said.
Be prepared to jump through a few hoops if you want to speed up your content, though. While some players make it easy to change your playback speed, others make it more difficult. On YouTube, it lives under settings. On Apple’s native podcast app, it’s right next to the play button, and other podcast players have a similar function.
Netflix, Hulu and HBO, however, don’t offer higher speeds on their players, but there are workarounds available. It’s possible to speed up online video through a Google Chrome extension, and an open-source media player called VLC will play many formats of digital media. Some set-top boxes like TiVo allow high-speed playback of recorded programmes.
It’s not clear how widely the practice has been adopted. In an informal poll on Twitter, David Chen, a host and producer of the movie and television podcast “Slashfilmcast” asked, “Do you ever listen to podcasts or watch TV/films at a faster speed than intended?”
Of 1,505 responses, 79 per cent chose the response “No, it’s an abomination,” while 16 per cent said they did so for podcasts and a total of 5 per cent said they did so for films, television and podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Chen and his co-hosts, Jeff Cannata and Devindra Hardawar, took up the question of speed viewing.
A listener asked, “In this increasingly content-rich, time-poor world, I wonder, how much of a crime against culture I am committing by speeding through these shows?”
The podcast hosts seemed aghast. “How dare you,” Cannata, said, adding that the practice “cheapens your entertainment”.
Hardawar said speed viewing did not allow time to soak in what was happening. “I feel like you are not even actually watching it,” he said. “You’re consuming it. You’re not actually like absorbing it or letting it work on you in a creative way. So yeah, this is bad. This is bad.”
Speed viewing waters down the emotional impacts of a movie, Peter Markham, senior filmmaker-in-residence at the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles, said.
“If you were watching a play by Pinter, for example, the pause could carry the greatest meaning,” he said. “I can’t imagine watching a movie at twice the speed.”
— New York Times News Service
