One can only look at so many dreary House of Cards apartments before nodding off, only to be woken up hours later by one of Cashew the Guinea Pig’s wheeks. Falling asleep is as much a part of the binge watching experience as drinking too much and ignoring your family and annoying calls from your boss who doesn’t understand how close you are to FINALLY finishing season five of Murphy Brown. The obvious drawback, though, is missing everything that happened after you passed out into your pile of Lone Star cans.
SCIENCE has an answer for that.
Netflix held itself a little hackathon, and one of the ingenious hacks to come out of the 24-hour key-clacking jamboree involved a wearable Fitbit device capable of detecting when a user had fallen asleep. With its motion-sensing capabilities tied into Netflix’s playback controls, it could then pause the movie. When the user went to play the movie back later, an option appeared for resuming the stream at the point he or she nodded off.
Even though this was a Netflix-backed hackathon, Netflix says that’s no guarantee we’ll ever see such a feature implemented. (Via)
It should be. God forbid we should miss even one Kevin Spacey eye roll.
