
I have found a new way to watch TV, and it changes everything - 6stringmerc
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/22/i-have-found-a-new-way-to-watch-tv-and-it-changes-everything/
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wingerlang
Doesn't this simply ruin tense moments? It also sounds funny which seems non
fitting.

I do the "skip around" at times, but mainly for stuff I've seen before.

But I guess I don't try to cram content, I simply watch stuff at the same time
as I do other things so the time saving is useless for me.

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breakingcups
Am I the only one who feels like this ruins the content as it was composed by
the creators?

Sure, for some TV shows the pace might be improved by speeding up. But are we
really so concerned with "keeping up" with the most recent episodes of TV
shows to the point of resorting to techniques like these to "cram more
episodes in an hour"? I watch TV shows to entertain myself, not to take part
in some rat race.

I'm currently about 4-5 weeks behind on the shows I like to watch and I'm fine
with that. Most of them have aired their season by now and I have another 9
months before a new season airs, which ought to be more than enough time to
watch them.

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daledavies
For me this doesnt work, I feel the comedy clip lost its humour (I guess the
timing just wasn't there) and game of thrones seems to actually gain humour.

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gumby
This works great with close captioning switched on as well -- I can glance at
the captions and the picture and enjoy the film at higher speed. If it's
really good I can go back to old fashioned 1x but very little, especially TV,
is worth it, any more than all books might be worth reading in their entirety.

I don't know why he claims that his habit "horrifies most people." Why should
it upset anyone at all?

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acconrad
I've been doing this for years thanks to VLC's ability to speed things up.
YouTube has had this feature for a while as well, as has Coursera.

If a typical show on TV is 1 hour long, 15-20 of it is commercials. I can
download that episode, watch it at 1.5x (or 2-3x if it's subtitled, for
example a foreign language film), and now what would have taken an hour out of
my day has only taken 30 minutes.

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ifoundthetao
I do this with audiobooks and it changed everything. I listen to them on
triple speed. For some things, I have to ramp up to it, and for others I can
only go 2.5x.

One trend I noticed was that I kept it at 1x on content I wanted to enjoy and
savor. But books on start-ups, books about the workplace and management
definitely went on 3x speed.

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pdxgene
I do this with business books -- turn on assistive screen reading on my
iPhone's Kindle app, and tweak the speaking speed to as fast as I can
reasonably understand.

But I'd never do it with a Mark Helprin novel, or anything with sentences so
beautiful you want to slow down and read them again.

I imagine I'd feel the same way about video content -- I can't imagine slowing
down anything but the most garden-variety-informational videos.

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nickthegreek
I started watching most of my shows digitally so that I could fit ~3 half an
hour episodes into an hour allowing me to devour more content. Watching those
shows at 160% would allow me to get another episode in that hour. I only wish
PLEX supported faster playback. Does anyone know if Kodi offers this option? I
know VLC does.

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spikej
With Kodi, I use external players like VLC and PotPlayer

With Plex, I've only ever been able to use the chrome extension mentioned in
the article successfully.

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nickthegreek
I stream my media through the plex app on an appletv currently. Looks like I
will need to wait for this feature to be implemented of change up my entire
htpc situation.

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6stringmerc
Quite a broad, though unique approach to discussing content consumption. One
of my things to think about later is how this article relates to the "MTV
Style" of rapid jump cuts. That would seem to support the baseline hypothesis
in some regards.

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greydius
A better option would be to not watch TV and do something productive with that
time instead.

