Sony Tries to Cash In on Snack Culture

The New York Times reports that Sony Corp and its production studio, Sony Pictures Television, are set to launch shrunken down episodes of old shows like Charlie's Angels and T.J. Hooker. The "minisodes," as Sony is calling them, will run no more than six minutes long and will be available on MySpace starting in June.

These are not clips of the shows, but actual episodes with beginnings, middles and ends, all told in under six minutes.

As Steve Mosko, the president of Sony Television, described it, “So in ‘Charlie Angels,’ they have a meeting, Charlie’s on the intercom telling them what the assignment is, there’s a couple of fights, and then a chase, and they catch the bad guy. Then they’re back home wrapping it up.”

This announcement comes on the heels of Wired's special report on snack culture, proving that maybe we were onto something...

The idea for condensed editions of these classic shows sprang from a casual conversation over a year ago between Mr. Mosko and another Sony Television executive, John Weiser, the head of distribution. They had noticed that an increasing number of people liked watching snippets of entertainment on Web sites like YouTube, rather than entire shows. The two Sony executives were aware that Viacom had been successful foraging through old libraries of shows on its cable channels like TV Land and Nick at Nite.

It's not much of a compliment to the writers of these vintage shows that you can cut and paste an hour's worth of content into six minutes and still have it make sense and be entertaining. You'd be hard pressed to shrink an episode of Lost or Battlestar Galactica to six minutes. Steven Johnson, what do you think?