Well, see, it depends.
One of the problems with setting a "standard length" for clips is that the companies who create the videos (who make up about 85% of clip suppliers/producers) most likely want to get as many of the different positions/scenes from the video into the clip as possible. Say a given video had about 10 different positions and/or scenes, as a great deal of them do (especially those from RealTickling and MagicT). If forced to adhere to the, say, "30-second standard" for clips, each scene would end up being around 3 seconds long. Of course, there are always titles and introductions which currently take up approximately five seconds apiece, so even if you dropped those down to three apiece, you'd end up having to cut each scene in the clip to an even shorter length. What you'd end up with, what the whole thing would equate to, is that the scenes would fly by like a slideshow that just took a snort of Columbian Marching Powder.
One of the things I've noticed people are bitching the most about, especially since the notorious Hotel Tickle clip, is that they're unable to tell whether or not the models are actually ticklish or faking because pictures rarely tell the full story of everything that's going on in the video. If you're flopping around on the floor trying desperately not to swallow your tongue because the quickly-flashing colors from the fast-moving scenes of the video clip have sent you into an epileptic seizure due to the fact that everyone wanted the clip to be only thirty seconds long, well, quite frankly you just can't judge ticklishness any better than you can from the stills.
Personally, my problem with the Hotel Tickle clip wasn't the quick scenes as much as the "dissolve" effect. Simple cuts from one scene to the next would've eliminated about half of the problem for me. I recall someone saying "you can barely tell what's going on before it cuts to the next scene." A great deal of the problem DID lie in the rapidity of the clips, but a lot of the "not being able to tell what was going on" came from the dissolving of one scene into the next. Each scene in the clip was approximately three seconds long, but for each one, about one second (beginning and end combined) was a half-dissolved piece of the scenes preceeding and following. You couldn't really tell what was going on because it was hard to perceive and fill in all of the fragmented bits of image. By the time our brains put together what might have been going on in the scene, little bits of the next scene were already fading in. You do this for about ten or fifteen short segments of the clip and the compounded confusion that results solves none of the "is she really ticklish?" questions usually asked about the videos.
Of course, many have brought up the prestigious reputations of said companies within the tickling communities, claiming that everyone should base their decisions to purchase videos on how great the videos produced by the company have been in the past. What if one has never purchased a tickling video before? Say someone is new to the whole concept, only recently discovering their fetish. (Personally, I don't feel tickling IS a fetish. I believe it ties in with normal human sexuality on a great deal of levels, from flirting to sex itself. It's playful, fun and exciting and really an incredible sensation. Sensual touch is very much a part of the sexual experiences of human beings. Tickling is a form of sensual touch. Therefore, tickling isn't really a fetish as much as a mere exaggeration of the sensual touch used in "normal" sexual activities, only extrapolated across the entire body. While sex doesn't always have to be involved, the act of tickling always has a very erotic tie-in. It's somewhat similar to a foot-massage. Those of you who have seen Pulp Fiction will know what I'm talking about. "Yeah, but... would you give another man a foot massage?" But, of course, that's an entirely different discussion.) But anyway, back to the topic at hand, say someone is new to the whole concept of tickling, recently discovering that it appeals to them so much. He/She does a quick search online and find that there's a company, say "Tickling Hot Chicks Inc.", that sells tickling videos for about forty dollars apiece. However, there are only pictures, no video or sound clips. Because of the fact that they're new to the scene and don't really know all that much about the different video producers in terms of quality tickling entertainment, he/she gets out his/her credit card and buys one of their videos, figuring the girls looked like they were ticklish enough in the pictures. A few days later UPS shows up on their doorstep to deliver the package and they pop it right into their VCR. However, to their dismay, the girls are blatantly faking their ticklishness and he/she feels totally ripped off. After all, wouldn't you?
See, there's the rub, for if they have no previous experience with any of the companies upon which to base their purchasing decisions, how will they be able to know whether or not the ticklees are, in fact, ticklish? Therefore, the argument that "the reputations will stand for themselves" isn't as valid as it would seem.
Perhaps changing length of the clips isn't as much of an issue as, say, changing filetype and compression. While I'm not sure of exact compression ratios and how much size an encoding into a different, more compressed format would save, I do know that DivX is a fast-growing format for video file encoding and the codecs for viewing are not very hard to obtain. Converting to DivX would allow clips to remain the same length but at the same time be reduced in size, solving (to an extent) the "oh, no! the clip has been barricaded off from downloadability by my shitty 'free web-hosting' provider!" problems everyone has been having. While this doesn't completely cure everyone of the problem, it does help. Maybe, like, twenty or so more people will be able to download the clip before it's cut off than could previously.
Regarding independent suppliers of clips, the ones making the, say, five minute long ones, the conversion to DivX will help, but don't go and sacrifice any length on the clip in addition to changing formats. As more and more people are switching to faster and faster connections, there's really no need to cater to the few still remaining on dialup. While it's true that they're getting a rather shitty deal in terms of download speeds and whatnot, all I can say is "Hey, I managed." I really didn't care what size a clip was. If it took a few extra minutes to download and had the additional length to account for it, I was pleased as punch to grab it. The whole experience tacked on a sense of accomplishment as well as the collecting of the clip into the library. "Hey, I actually downloaded a several-minute-long video clip with this shitty dialup modem!" Musicians aren't going to make shorter songs so you'll have quicker MP3 downloads, you know.
Kathy: I read your post regarding video clips in the "to clip or not to clip" (or whatever the hell it was called) thread. I'm a fairly decent editor, if I may say so, and have Ulead Video Studio in my possession in addition to a video-in on my geforce3. You said you don't really have the time to work on editing the clips, but I have plenty, really. If you're interested in having someone piece together a little something for your videos to appease the fans, as an aspiring filmmaker and a tickling fan myself I believe that I could probably easily whip something up that would both display the ticklishness of the models and not give away enough for people to not want to purchase the actual video. (Of course, I'm not saying that whoever makes the current clips isn't capable, but it'll free you up from the constant "where's my clip" questions, not to mention the actual task of having to go through and edit out segments to actually create the clip itself.) If you're interested, contact me in a reply on this string and I'll e-mail you my e-mail address.
Christ, I feel like I'm writing an english paper titled "Tickling Video Clips and Implications Thereof", so I suppose I'll quit my ranting.
......For now...... o/` Duh-duh-duuuuuuhhhhhhh o/`
