Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet Media Television

Minisode Network Condenses TV Shows to Under Six Minutes 160

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the readers-digest-television dept.
CNN is reporting on a (relatively) new website called the Minisode Network that allows users to watch popular television shows that have been strategically condensed down to somewhere between four and six minutes. "Don't think of the Minisode Network as a brand-new Web site. Think of it as a long-overdue public service. That is, who among us hasn't felt the double-edged sword of our media age: So much video from TV, DVDs, the Internet and even cell phones ... but too little time to watch it all? The Minisode Network has a solution. Launched in June as a broadband channel on the MySpace site, it offers, for our streaming pleasure, episodes of vintage Sony Pictures Television series like 'Silver Spoons,' 'Starsky & Hutch,' 'Diff'rent Strokes' and even Ricki Lake's talk show."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Minisode Network Condenses TV Shows to Under Six Minutes More

Minisode Network Condenses TV Shows to Under Six Minutes

Comments Filter:

  • hmm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Winckle ( 870180 ) <`ku.oc.elkcniw' `ta' `kram'> on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @03:41PM (#19746471) Homepage
    Is this a rather sad reflection of today's culture?

    Or am I just being outmoded and stubborn?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If you want a sad reflection on todays culture, consider that most Hollywood movies would benefit from being cut down to 6 minutes.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by ChrisMounce ( 1096567 )
      tl;dr

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 )
      Yesterday's culture, you mean. All the shows are from 20 years ago.

      I don't doubt that today's shows could receive the same treatment with the same results, though. Nothing changes. TV will always be 90% fluff and commercials as long as it's how they make money, and it doesn't appear that other money sources are likely.

      I had hoped to see shows like Kyle XY on there, that I like the story but the majority of the ep is fluff. Grey's Anatomy (ow, gimme back my geek card!) too. Oddly, Lost is one of the sho

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Yesterday's culture, you mean. All the shows are from 20 years ago.blockquote>

        If you go there, most of the shows are from 20 years ago. But there are a few contemporaries, like Dilbert (2001-ish)... which is perfect for office use, I think. Just like people post dilbert cartoons on their cubes, they'll be mailing minisodes of the Dilbert series as well...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by g0dsp33d ( 849253 )
      Back in my day we used to have to pay attention for 30 minutes...

      That's it. I'm investing all my money in ADD medicines.

      • Re:hmm (Score:4, Funny)

        by Yvan256 ( 722131 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @07:11PM (#19748297) Homepage Journal
        That's a great idea! I'll also invest all my money into SUB... erm.

        MOV... no...

        SHR... that's not it either...

        ah, now I remember! NOP medicines.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mgblst ( 80109 )
          I am going to invest my money in MUL - the return is much higher.
        • NOP medicines.

          Could be a good investment. With the number of clinical studies that go on, there's always going to be a market for placebo pills.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Yvan256 ( 722131 )
            You could also combine that idea with a social study by actually calling your pills "Placebo" (or something that sounds like it).

      • Don't thing that was the point. It' been a while since I watched any TV, but it seemed even back then that there was less than 4 minutes of actual content in a 30-minute segment, so compressing it to that point would not be all that remarkable.

    • Re:hmm (Score:4, Funny)

      by Bullfish ( 858648 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @04:10PM (#19746815)
      Yeah, you're outmoded and stubborn. I bet you read books printed on paper too
    • This is a means for people to watch 6 minute shows on the web instead of 30 minute shows on the couch. Seems to me this is a great example of how people would like stories told these days.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mixxu ( 1076713 )
      You are. I'd write a lengthier response if I had the time.

    • Re:hmm (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @05:44PM (#19747681)
      "Is this a rather sad reflection of today's culture?"

      Maybe. Or maybe it's a reflection of how hard (or easy) it is to squeeze a story into exactly 22 minutes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Seumas ( 6865 )
      I don't see a problem with it. Personally, I'm a busy person. A lot of professionals have very busy careers, then they may have personal projects that they hope to turn into a business some day. Then they have hefty hobbies of some sort. Some also have family to deal with. The last thing they want to waste time on is a three hour movie or an hour long television show with twenty-two minutes of commercials.

      I have a habit of listening to podcasts or books on audio or even radio talk shows like Rick Emerson [rickemerson.com] at

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by fritzbrown ( 1122921 )
        You do have the time to enjoy a good book or movie, you choose not to. Nothing wrong with that, though I'd be willing to bet that if you actually read John Stewart's book you'd realize that you missed quite a bit of content.

        I'm a busy person also but if a one hour television show can be cut down to six minutes and retain it's story, it isn't worth watching at any length.

    • Re:hmm (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kebes ( 861706 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @05:55PM (#19747769) Journal
      One interpretation is that it's sad that people don't have the attention span to watch a 30-minute show, and would rather watch a 5-minute compressed version of it.

      Another interpretation is that it's sad that the content in question is so bad, so filled with fluff and useless scenes, that it can be comfortably compressed by a factor of 6 with little loss in intelligent commentary or entertainment value.

      Frankly I don't think many people are going to want to watch compressed versions of Schindler's List. But many shows truly are needlessly long and slow-moving (the intention, I suppose, it to increase the ratio of commercials to production dollars). I think a crappy hour-long show could conceivably be compressed into an entertaining 5-minute show by a talented editor. In fact, many movie trailers (which are only a few minutes long) are quite a bit more compelling, funny, and entertaining than the full-length movies they advertise. Some things are really not worth an hour of my time. But 5 minutes? Maybe.
      • Cliff's Notes has been compressing literature down to booklets for about fifty years. Does that mean that Dickens and Tolstoy and so forth wrote 'fluff'?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Retric ( 704075 )
          Yes, over 1/2 of Dickens and Tolstoy is fluff.

          EX: Dickens was paid by installment so like modern TV shows he had to add fluff to remind people what's going on and to keep each installment interesting.

          PS: IMO Tolstoy was just a wind bag.
        • Or, more directly, the fluff of Dickens and Tolstoy has literary and artistic merit while the fluff of sitcoms truly is expendible.

    • Or am I just being outmoded and stubborn?
      It's like arguing whether big lolly pops are better than small ones. The Dukes of Hazard isn't particularly enlightening, whether in 6 or 25 minutes.
    • If you are pressed for time spend that 6 minutes watching something other than the crap they mentioned!

    • This is straight out of Fahrenheit 451. The entire reason they burnt books.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 [wikipedia.org]

      Summary of the summary of the summary. One line news. One line shows. Single word summaries. Burn the books!

      We see it all the time. From presidential election to reasons for war. Sound bites. No substance.
  • I dont know if I can watch that fast.

  • huh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aquabat ( 724032 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @03:48PM (#19746549) Journal
    This reminds me of those old half hour versions of Knight Rider they used to show on Saturday mornings. They would edit out all the drama dialogue, so that all that was left were the Hoff talking to his Firebird and Lots of Turbo boosts. Basically only scenes with action music under them.

    They're doing the same thing with Holmes on Homes, on HGTV. Personally, I can't stand it, but I'm one of those guys who always waits for the extended edition of a film to be released before buying it.

    I guess I like my entertainment for the nutrition, rather than the taste.

    • I used to love Knight Rider as a kid... I ended up buying a couple of seasons on DVD. Man, what a waste. Being older and wiser you can see plain as day that the plot structure was basically the same on every show... almost down to the very second the plotline would unfold the same way.

      I used to like the show House too... but it suffers the exact same problem, albeit more busy (more going on).

      • Re:huh (Score:5, Funny)

        by dangitman ( 862676 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @06:35PM (#19748083)

        Being older and wiser you can see plain as day that the plot structure was basically the same on every show... almost down to the very second the plotline would unfold the same way.

        Michael: Faster, Knight Boat! We gotta catch those starfish poachers.
        Knight Boat: You don't have to yell, Michael, I'm all around you.
        Michael: Oh, no! They're headed for land.
        Michael: We'll never catch them now.
        Knight Boat: Incorrect--look! A canal.
        Homer: Go, Knight Boat, go!
        Bart: Oh, every week there's a canal.
        Lisa: Or an inlet.
        Bart: Or a fjord.
        Homer: Quiet! I will not hear another word against the boat.
        Marge: OK, TV off. It's family time.
        Homer: Oh, but Marge! Knight Boat, the crime-solving boat!
        Marge: Homer, you promised. One night of family time a week. Besides, that back-talking boat sets a bad example.
        Bart: Says you, woman.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hob42 ( 41735 )
      On GSN, they compress Who Wants To Be A Millionaire for extra commercial space too. Though you can't catch the dropped frames, it's pretty obvious when everyone's voices suddenly go up in pitch by a few steps.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vux984 ( 928602 )
      They're doing the same thing with Holmes on Homes, on HGTV.

      Actually that's a good candidate. Its a show that is part informative, but mostly just fluff punctuated by pointless scenes of banging, sawing, pouring concrete, or carrying wood, etc. I find the content of the show interesting enough, but all I want is the 6 minutes that are acutally relevant...

      1) What the situation is.
      2) What was done.
      3) Why/How it was done.
      4) The finished product

      I don't want or need to see the poor homeowner moan at the start abo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spoco2 ( 322835 )
      "Basically only scenes with action music under them."
      "I guess I like my entertainment for the nutrition, rather than the taste."

      Bingo, you've hit on the reason why this is a terrible thing... you can condense any movie, book, tv show, whatever, into a much more compact retelling of the main events of the story. However, in doing so you lose the nuances, the humour, the true spirit of the show (unless it really was terrible to begin with). So often the magic of a show is not in the A-B-C events, but in the s

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mgblst ( 80109 )
      This reminds me of those old half hour versions of Knight Rider they used to show on Saturday mornings. They would edit out all the drama dialogue, so that all that was left were the Hoff talking to his Firebird and Lots of Turbo boosts. Basically only scenes with action music under them.

      They're doing the same thing with Holmes on Homes, on HGTV. Personally, I can't stand it, but I'm one of those guys who always waits for the extended edition of a film to be released before buying it.

      I guess you a
    • They're doing the same thing with Holmes on Homes, on HGTV. Personally, I can't stand it, but I'm one of those guys who always waits for the extended edition of a film to be released before buying it.

      Are you sure you wheren't watching reruns of the first couple seasons of Holmes on Homes when the show was only half an hour long?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by aquabat ( 724032 )
        I wasn't aware that the show was ever shot to be half an hour long. I could swear that, of all the condensed episodes I've seen, I've also seen a full hour version.

  • Today on Maury... (Score:5, Funny)

    by KillerCow ( 213458 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @03:49PM (#19746571)
    Who's the father of Kisha's baby? Tyrone.

    Tune in next week!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Dachannien ( 617929 )
      As for the out-of-control-teens episodes, those can usually be summed up in one word:

      "Whatever."

  • Oh NO they did NOT!

    They bettah check themselves, because they a bunch a' stank hoes over at Minisodes. MmmmmHMMM!

    • Excuse me for replying to my own post, but there's a grammar error.

      <hand on hips>

      They bettah check THEYselves, because they a bunch a' stank hoes over at Minisodes. MmmmmHMMM!

      </hand on hips>

      Thank you for your time.

  • That is easy to explain (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Television and cinemas never had any nor ever will have any substance. Try reading a classic book or even try a play or an opera. Much more subtance than the idiot boxes and idiot buildings commonly known as television and cinemas.

  • Been there shun that (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 )
    I've noticed they've been compressing Trek reruns by dropping occassional frames. It creates jerky motions that are annoying, such as when a ship glides by. It also seems to occasionally scramble a word or two. I think I would rather have a human decide where to cut than randomly drop frames, although both suck.
    • Thats because commercial breaks were 3 minutes when those episodes were made, and now? 4+. Gotta make more room.

  • Blipverts! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geoff lane ( 93738 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @03:53PM (#19746613)
    I'm more and more convinced that TV companies think that Max Headroom is a model to copy rather than a warning.

  • You don't have to watch everything (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @03:54PM (#19746623)
    "...a long-overdue public service... So much video from TV, DVDs, the Internet and even cell phones ... but too little time to watch it all?"

    I don't think it's a service to the public. Nobody needs to watch everything. Sometimes it's better if you don't - if you don't have the time or don't want to put in an effort. Just because you have read the 40-pages condensed version, don't think that you have actually read the novel or play. You have not. The creation of half-informed population does not help to face the ever increasing complexity of issues that the society needs to address.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Joebert ( 946227 )
      Have you ever had anyone superglue your eyelashes to your eyebrows when you were passed out drunk ?
    • Wait, you're saying that these TV shows are fiction and aren't actual worlds that I'm missing out on if I don't watch?

      (been TV-free for about 6 years now and haven't missed a thing)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jez9999 ( 618189 )
      I don't think it's a service to the public. Nobody needs to watch everything.

      For me, Minisode's greatness is not about watching everything. It's about one thing: Introducing me to Sheena; the most original excuse to show off a cute blonde's breasts I've EVER seen.

    • Nobody needs to watch everything.
      And in many cases, nor *should* people watch everything - and some shows shouldn't even be on the air at all for how idiotic they are. I mean, thanks to shows like "Survivor" people will actually think now that when stranded on some random desert island they will magically be rewarded with matches or whatnot. How many people think they can actually sing or make lyrics due to "American Idol" and the 20 clone shows airing???

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mex ( 191941 )
      This post was too long can someone please condense it for me to read
  • Does this mean they'll have to change the theme song to "20 minute tour" instead of 3 hour tour?

  • Genius! (Score:2, Funny)

    by SinGunner ( 911891 )
    This is the perfect thing for anime!
    • Yeah, they could condense Noir into 5 episodes. Then it might actually be worth watching.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SamSim ( 630795 )
      Not all anime is excrutiatingly slow-paced, but I would definitely be interested to see what they come up with regarding Dragonball Z. Underneath the tedious "Hyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!"s and filler there are some good concepts and the occasional decent fight scene. Paring the whole thing down to ~2 hours per saga could only be a good thing.
  • If you can't sit for 21 minutes and watch the .avi you seriously need to up the ritalin. Or maybe simplify your life.
  • I welcm r quik ovrlrds

  • Speed Watching (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I typically watch dvd's of TV shows at 175% speed (the limit on my player) it takes a little getting used to, to keep up with the audio.
    For complex scenes (rare) I may slow down to 120%

    • Re:Speed Watching (Score:4, Interesting)

      by kebes ( 861706 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @06:07PM (#19747847) Journal
      For awhile I used to watch the evening news using this method. I had my MythTV set to record the 6-o'clock news, so that when I got home I would watch it at high-speed. By skipping commercials and segments I wasn't interested in (especially the numerous fluff pieces), and by setting the playback speed to ~150%, I could watch an hour of news in 8-12 minutes.

      It worked fine, and taught me that TV has a very high ratio of filler to content.
  • Gotta stop letting people watch old episodes of Max Headroom on Joost.

    (Just watched the blipverts episode last night. Freaky.)
  • Not enough time to watch? Get a DVR. Intros, credits, and (mainly) commercials make up 33% the length of any TV shows.

    Plus, you waste less of your time, due to repeats. Remember, it's standard for series to produce a total of about 15 episodes annually... while there are 52 weeks in a year. So if you're a time-slot watcher, you're just wasting most of your time.

    As to the subject at hand, I'd like to see it go the other way. Give me a few short hours of quality shows each week, and I'd be happy. Short
    • Incorrect.

      AMERICAN TV series average 15 episode a year. Japan for example has series which make 52 a year, every year.
      • American prime time shows are typically 26 episodes per year, not 15. Subtract a few for recap episodes, and you're still over 20.
  • Whats really the point of this? You miss out on all the small jokes and general expressions.. So what if you understand the story... you get to see zero character development. This is somewhat like watching only recaps. There is no dept, so it will probably kill the show.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )
      Whats really the point of this?

      Not feeling left out the watercooler while wasting 1/10th of the time? Sounds to me like the only meaningful use, if you really did like it then you'd watch it. This would be like just reading the plot summary of a book.
  • I wanna see the 5 min Transformers movie version, with all the robots edited out! Man, that would ROCK.
  • design an Intelligence Pass filter. That would reduce the length even more. Hell, it might even go negative.
  • If anyone thinks the plot of a particular show can still be understood after such massive editing, then the show wasn't worth watching in the first place. The true public service is that we get a nice list of shows that aren't worth the waste of time, be it 48, 22 or six minutes.

  • Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

    by captainboogerhead ( 228216 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @04:24PM (#19746943) Journal
    A non-infuriating way to watch Lost.
  • If they reduce everything to the bare minimum, what is that minimum? The plot? Well, if we go that route, we can hear/read/see all stories ever told in half a day. Was it Borges who said there were only about half a dozen possible plots, and then listed them? So what would we do the rest of our lives?

    As for operas, in case you didn't know, they are the story of a passion between a soprano and a tenor, with a baritone who disagrees. Now that you know the plot, you can spare yourself weeks of watching/listeni
  • Thirty Second Bunny Theatre [angryalien.com] had been condensing movies to thirty seconds for a while.

  • Contentless programmes? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jareth-0205 ( 525594 ) on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @04:53PM (#19747211) Homepage
    I think by far the scariest thing about this site is how the episodes don't seem to have lost anything in the edit.
  • I've often commented as the credits came up on 1/3rd of the screen, too small to see, in fast forward that TV was quickly heading this way and that soon you'd have very short shows and much longer periods filled with commercials. Pretty soon all channels will have as much to offer as the shopping network (ie. nothing) and the execs wonder why ratings go down.
  • It's refreshing to see TV is keeping pace with my sex drive.

  • Ray Bradbury must be proud (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Fahrenheit 451 has truly arrived.

    Release the Hounds!
  • Doesn't Reader's Digest hold a patent on 'condensed books'?
  • Reminds me of a Peanuts strip Schultz ran in the 50s.

    Lucy bugs Charlie Brown into reading her a story. He reads:
    "Once upon a time and they all lived happily ever after."

    Condensed story-telling in its early stages.
  • I used to watch many of these shows featured(diffrent strokes, silver spoons, etc) on Comcast's On Demand, which lasted only 20 minutes without commercials. It shows you just how brief a 30 minute tv show is.

    This just takes it further. Take out the usual main characters insulting each other, some off-topic banter, stitch the main 'situation' and the apology/lesson afterward, and you're done.

    Beautiful. It showed you just how formulatic these shows were/are.
  • David Brin predicted exactly this in his novel "Earth", which was published, IIRC, in the late 1980s...
  • If it's possible to condense a whole book into three paragraphs:
    http://users.ox.ac.uk/~shil1883/condense.html [ox.ac.uk]

    Surely it should be possible to do better with 30 minutes of TV?
  • Have they made a deal with the copyright holders? If they haven't, won't they go down the same road as the outfit that sold bowdlerized versions of movies?
  • Copyright lawsuits in: 3... 2... 1...
  • It's nothing but 30 year old sitcoms that weren't particularly cool in the first place! I mean, you can concentrate shit, and what you get is concentrated shit. Which is bad.

  • Ahem... (Score:3, Funny)

    by JRHelgeson ( 576325 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @02:31AM (#19751133) Homepage Journal
    ADHDTV anyone?
  • Condensing sitcoms to around 6 minutes is a simple matter of time shifting and skipping the 24 minutes' worth of commercials.
  • I had a similar idea for today's "time poor" consumer who nonetheless must watch everyhing - a player that would show the episodes sped up by, say, 5% (though this could be variable). Everything would seem a bit off speedwise, but not so much so that it would be unwatchable, and you save a small but not insignificant bit of time! Would be good for journalists on tight deadlines!

    It came to me when I read that movies which are 24fps in the movies are playing at 25fps on TV, so the runtimes are slightly shorte
  • An episode of "Dr. Phil":

    Guest: "I'm thirteen! I'm old enough to have all the children I want with my 40-year old brother! I've had three so far and nothing bad has happened...I'm going to keep having them!"

    Dr. Phil: "You suck. Bad."

    Guest: "You're right, Dr. Phil. Maybe I'll straighten up after all."

    An episode of "Everyone Loves Raymond"

    Raymond: "God, I'm so insecure that it makes me utterly inept. At everything."

    Everyone else: "Yeah, but that's just because we're all so sadistic that we circle around
  • This has already been done [youtube.com], and quite well too.

Slashdot Top Deals

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

Close