Napflix: the streaming service that wants to bore viewers to sleep

“Play” has become the new snooze button.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.