A recent news item highlights interesting developments around the consumption of long-form screen content. According to this article, Sony Pictures TV plans to launch a new service called PIX, touting it as the first movie network for mobile phones in the US.

Despite some experiments with on-demand movies, the US studios have tended to see mobile media as a marketing vehicle rather than a fully-fledged delivery platform for feature films. By contrast, PIX will work as a linear channel, making available such feature titles as Ghostbusters, Stand by Me and Philadelphia for mobile viewing.

What is most striking about the article, however, is a comment made by Eric Berger, the company’s VP, Mobile Entertainment. Acknowledging that many consumers are unlikely to watch a full-length feature on their mobile phone, Berger makes clear that Sony expects a mode of engagement very different from traditional cinema viewing: ‘This isn’t for people looking to view a movie for the first time. It’s OK to miss the beginning’. This comment squares with recent predictions by certain media observers that ‘snackable long-form’ will be the growth area for mobile content.

It also raises interesting questions about the type of long-form content most suited to this distracted viewing experience. Certainly, PIX’s list of titles doesn’t appear to make any obvious concessions to the non-linear viewing that Berger predicts. It features fairly conventional fare, including The Karate Kid, Layer Cake, Resident Evil and Roxanne.

A little more intriguingly, it will also deliver Memento, Christopher Nolan’s 2000 fractured neo-noir about a man with a short-term memory condition. Will the fragmented chronology of this story be well suited to media snacking, or will it render the film entirely incomprehensible? As Berger suggests, PIX may be best suited for re-watching films we’ve already seen.

In any case, if Berger’s prediction turns out to be true, then PIX will serve as the latest development in a long history of distracted viewing. The surrealists were early masters of this: in Paris in the 1920s, Andre Breton and his friends would wander from cinema to cinema, taking in a few minutes of a film before moving on to another one, creating their own unique media experience. During the remainder of the 20th Century, the development of television and the growth of new places to watch movies (from the drive-in to the aeroplane) have made distracted viewing a way of life for many.

Clearly, Sony itself views this as something of an experiment, suggesting the channel may shift to an on-demand service in future. Yet this experiment, like many others currently in train, promises interesting implications both for the future of mobile media and the future of that venerable media form, the full-length feature film.

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