Cell Content Redux
The question probably never occurred to viewers in the 1970s and 1980s, but suddenly it is highly relevant: exactly how much worthwhile entertainment content was there in shows like “Charlie’s Angels,” “T. J. Hooker,” and “Starsky and Hutch”?
The Sony Corporation and its production studio, Sony Pictures Television, which controls the rights to those and many other relics of a distant era of television, have come up with an answer to that question: three and a half to five minutes.
That’s the length Sony has shrunk episodes down to in order to create what the company hopes is an appealing new business in retooling old shows for a new era of entertainment. Sony even has a name for these shrunken slices of television nostalgia: minisodes.
Want more? Visit the New York Times. Okay so do you kids think this is going to work? Not me, give me porn, cartoons or games, but this just seems like a lazy way to try and ride in on the laurels of old shows. Let’s have a bit more creativity folks! What do you think?
November 6th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
I just discovered the sniffer a couple of months ago so I’m going back through old content.
Actually, those old crime drama/action type shows were an hour long, or 44 minutes of actual content (maybe 46 or 48 in the 70s due to less advertising).
Is an hour-long show really being squished into 5 minutes, or are they doing multiple “minisodes” for each show? Pretty amazing to think someone can reduce the time by that much and have anything meaningful.
This kind of relates to the Internet news clip from the late, great Bill Cameron that you mentioned in March - how a 6:30 long clip wouldn’t fly anymore in the face of our rapidly decreasing attention spans…