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Napflix: the streaming service that wants to bore viewers to sleep Napflix: the streaming service that wants to bore viewers to sleep
(about 3 hours later)
A Spanish video platform called Napflix, designed to put people to sleep with dull content, has been launched this week and its founders are on the lookout for more “monotony and repetition”. “Play” has become the new snooze button.
Napflix offers about 60 videos taken from YouTube, including footage of rain pattering on windowpanes, a documentary on pandas and quantum physics lectures, to help people doze off. Napflix, a new streaming video service aimed at lulling viewers to sleep through “monotony and repetition”, has been launched this week, offering a selection of the least thrilling videos on the internet.
“The idea is to make entertainment boring,” Víctor Gutiérrez de Tena, one of Napflix’s two co-founders told AFP on Friday. Those battling insomnia can, for example, tune into 2.5 hours of footage showing Easter worshippers carrying saints down the streets of Malaga. Others might find that sleep is better induced by the 1995 royal wedding of Spain’s Infanta Elena, or a documentary on Quantum theory.
“We are looking for monotony and repetition,” the 31-year-old said of the service, which was launched on Monday. “The idea is to make entertainment boring,” Victor Gutierrez de Tena, 31, one of Napflix’s two co-founders told AFP.
“It could be the kind of things that remind us of our childhood, like post-lunch classes and TV serials we watched after meals which just went on and on, ones where you wouldn’t lose the plot if you fell asleep,” he said.“It could be the kind of things that remind us of our childhood, like post-lunch classes and TV serials we watched after meals which just went on and on, ones where you wouldn’t lose the plot if you fell asleep,” he said.
Other offerings include clips of petanque – a traditional French game of boules – and excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake. Gutierrez de Tena and his co-founder both work in advertising, although Napflix is free and not part of an advertising campaign. But the website, which launched on Monday, does fit into a wider trend for slow and “boring” content to calm busy minds.
Although Gutiérrez de Tena and his co-founder work in advertising, he said Napflix was not a paid publicity campaign, but rather an experiment in building up communities of fans on different online platforms. Writer and performer Drew Ackerman created the popular Sleep with Me podcast, which consists of Ackerman reading out – for about an hour – an original whimsical story that doesn’t always make sense.
Despite Spain’s reputation as the land of the afternoon siesta, the vast majority of Spaniards forgo that postprandial slumber, according to a survey by a bed manufacturer. Or, as Ackerman promises in the subtitle, “a lulling, droning, boring bedtime story to distract your racing mind”.
“As you listen you will find yourself distracted from your worries and drifting off into dreamland ... due to the fact the story gets a little bit more boring with each passing minute,” he writes on his website.
Norwegian public broadcaster NRK is head sloth of the slow TV pack, broadcasting slow-paced live content, that’s designed to be relaxing, since 2009.
The first show focused on a man shearing a sheep – and since then it’s included a seven hour cross-country train journey, 10 hours of people cutting firewood and making fires and 12 hours of people knitting.
A multi-day cruise through the fjords had 3.2 million viewers tune in (in a country of five million) with people turning out to wave at the boat and hold up posters to friends and family.