For Tiny Screens, Some Big Dreams – New York Times is a reasonable overview of the mobile entertainment ‘ space’.
Interesting, because it’s clear there’s a design pattern that’s emerging – simple games, 5 minute ‘catchup’s’ of TV shows, a few minutes of comedy, and:
” Wide-angle shots are to be avoided, while slow-motion clips are to be welcomed. The sweet spot for video clips appears to be between 45 and 75 seconds. Short clips of confrontational conversations, like the big finish on the talk show “Pardon the Interruption,” are popular…”
I’ve been watching an increasing amount of people showing each other clips of Angry Kid (warning, audio is NSFW), a profane claymation cartoon. where a kid just swears a lot…guaranteed giggles for 30 seconds.
I think the clips have been transmitted over bluetooth from 3 customers (that’s the 3, not three physical customers :-) which is an interesting peer-peer transfer ecology.
And my Dad just came back from Hong Kong/China, where ‘all the kids’ are on the subway system watching video clips on titchy oled display flash devices…
So…does this have a negative affect on design – the end of immersive, long-term media ‘experiences’? How does this affect the expectations of people when they create information, share and learn from each other? Will people refine their communications to last only a few minutes?
That’s not as bad as it might seem – I think smaller attention ‘spaces’ will create an interesting constraint on information and entertainment designers…although I’m mindful how this has dumbed down news broadcasting into meaningless soundbites…
McLuhan never seemed so pertinent, huh?