The average length of an online video, at three minutes, says a lot about our short attention spans.
But if even that length challenges, there’s a useful tool that cuts yawns by reducing the three minutes to just 60 seconds.
Enounce has just launched MySpeed, a program that detects when video is being played in the Flash format used by YouTube and hundreds of other sites.
It launches a slider that allows the video to be slowed down to as much as a third of normal speed or sped up to 3x normal play.
Enounce says slowing down videos can help with speech transcription and speeding up can help analysts work their way through long presentations faster.
These professional examples perhaps explain the pricing structure – a Pro version for $50 and a Premier version for $100. At those rates, consumers are unlikely to be attracted to what is a relatively simple tool.
There is a free “Community” version, but the range is restricted to a level that I found made little difference to speeds.
There was another problem as well, even with the Premier edition – speeding up the video means you can overrun the caching that is taking place.
You’ve probably noticed the bar that runs ahead of videos watched online, showing that the service is working at storing the video coming up to enable a smooth playback.
With MySpeed set to 3x normal play, I found it often outran this caching process, so it would quickly catch up and stall the video – meaning I was not saving the time I expected, due to having to wait for the video to restart.
One aspect I did enjoy was the ability to speed through pre-roll ads running before the video.
Enounce is based in Palo Alto and its founders first developed their ideas at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Their MySpeed product will probably work best in standalone players where Flash files have already been downloaded, as glitches are likely to occur in the streaming web-browser experience.
