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i think Hulu speeds up parts of Futurama episodes. (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago by tilefan@lemm.ee to c/futurama@lemmy.world

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watching Wild Green Yonder with a friend, me watching the movie on my Plex, them watching the version broken into episodes on Hulu.

i pulled Hulu up to make sure i stayed synced, and the Hulu version quickly pulled ahead of mine. i didn't notice a missing scene but i wasn't paying close attention to the Hulu version.

when Hulu auto-cycled to the next episode, even with outro and intro credits, it brought it back to sync with my version. we're ⅓ through episode two, and Hulu is currently 14 seconds ahead, although we started this episode synced.

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[-] plz1@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago

It's for ad time. At some point, the TV industry realized though couldn't get studios to make "30 minute" shows shorter then they already were (for ad breaks), so they artificially compress those show times to fit more seconds of ads in addition to the ad breaks they already had time for.

So say a studio releases a 20 minute episode of content for a 30-minute time block, distribution companies like Hulu will take that 10 minutes for ads,, plus compress (by speeding up) the 20 minute episode, too. It wouldn't even surprise me if they use an algorithm to determine which parts of the episode they can speed up more aggressively than others, to hide that impact from the viewer.

[-] tilefan@lemm.ee 7 points 1 month ago

I get that for broadcast, but for streaming it doesn't make any sense, it's not like ad breaks on streaming used to be the same length as on cable. on top of that, I wasn't getting ads when watching this on Hulu