CompuWorld

Remember Charlie's Angels, the 3 Girls, solving different crimes on TV screen in 30 minutes? With changing technology those same 30 minutes problem would be worth of maximum around 5 or 6 minutes? Satisfied? No? But Sony Corporation is.

The legal owner of many such relics of a distant era of television, that’s the length Sony has shrunk episodes down to in order to create what the company hopes is an appealing new business in retooling old shows for a new era of entertainment. Sony even has a name for these shrunken slices of television nostalgia: minisodes.

Sony Television is planning in June to introduce an Internet-based service called the Minisode Network, initially offering the mini-shows for an exclusive run on MySpace. (The company may consider establishing a separate Internet channel called the Minisode Network later.)

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.”

With sites like YouTube proving that people love to watch snippets of the real long TV soaps, Sony is sure to benefit from this innovative idea. Wonder when will the famous O.C.'s and the slow but long long Ekta Kapoor's soaps will get such treatment.