I have found a new way to watch TV, and it changes everything
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
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.
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.
I don't know why he claims that his habit "horrifies most people." Why should it upset anyone at all?
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.
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.
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.
With Plex, I've only ever been able to use the chrome extension mentioned in the article successfully.