Blipverts, Max Headroom’s Favourite Podcast Feature
I’ve been thinking about Max Headroom and how its prediction of a world drenched in adverts saw the invention of blipverts, advertising speeded up to an incredible rate to pack more in per hour… which had the unfortunate side effect of cramming too much information into someone’s head, causing spontaneous combustion.
Thankfully the prediction that heads would explode if they were overexposed to very fast audio hasn’t come true, And I know that because of my podcast habits, and my near-constant use of playback speed to crank up the, err, ‘minutes listened per minutes’ setting, which is an incredibly useful feature for me.
Listening at faster speeds does lead to some weird moments and it’s not suitable for every podcast. Scripted podcasts — be they drama, comedy, or something else — need the tempo the creative team have settled on, so they are pretty much guaranteed the natural x1 speed in my settings. Everything else, especially unscripted discussion-based podcasts — is fair game to be throttled up.
Why?
The main consideration for me is a situational one. Most of my podcast listening is on a daily ‘walk around the block’ (you can join me on these walks through my Instagram account), which generally works out to be around forty minutes give or take. And there are not a lot of forty-minute-long podcasts in my playlist. There are plenty podcasts that are an hour long though.
(There’s a parallel discussion here about podcast episodes that regularly reach the ninety-minute mark and beyond but I’d need a bigger margin).
But I can happily crank up the speed and bring a one-hour podcast into my walking schedule. Running at x1.4 speed, the 60 minutes comes down to 43 minutes and at x1.7 its just 35 minutes. Depending on the speakers, this is the tempo that I am comfortable with. And when you have additional options to remove excess silence or implement a ‘smart speed’ option that varies the rate for best effect, then you get a little bit more time.
It takes some getting used to, and it may feel strange at first but when you relax into it the speed control on your podcast player becomes invaluable. It lets you take control of your podcast listening, tailor it to what you need, to enjoy more independent audio, and it doesn’t blow up your head like some early 1980s techno-thriller.
Now, if someone could find me a setting that allowed all the speech to accelerate, but the theme tunes play at the regular speed, I’d be ever so grateful. I can’t get over how tepid many of the theme tunes are when I listen at normal speed…
