Heeding the pleas of parents around the globe and across the ages who deal with cries of "Just five more minutes!" on a nightly basis, Netflix has introduced five-minute episodes of the popular kids DreamWorks TV show Dinotrux—cut down drastically from their typical 23 minutes. The reason? Kids stall at bedtime, and Netflix is marketing these short videos as win-win for parents and kids alike, reports KFOR 4. "Netflix and DreamWorks Animation engineered the new shows knowing exactly what kids love most: rewatching their favorite scenes," Netflix says in a press release.
Its bedtime routine survey—of more than 7,200 parents in the US, UK, Brazil, Mexico, France, Canada, and Australia—found that American kids are especially good at employing "creative stall tactics," and that it takes parents in the US 19 minutes to put kids to bed, compared to the 17-minute average across all countries polled. Parents in France are fastest, at 12 minutes. Netflix says parents will look like the good guys when they let their kids watch a five-minute episode of Dinotrux before bed, but it remains to be seen whether it speeds or slows the typical bedtime routine or impacts a child's ability to fall asleep. And while Mashable calls it a truce, it also notes a disturbing trend found by a recent Nielson report that finds TV viewing among kids at an eight-year high, with children ages 2 to 5 spending 32 hours a week in front of a TV. (Netflix has determined the exact time at which people get hooked on certain TV shows.)