Why I watch most videos at single speed

Growing up, I was one of those kids who watched every YouTube video I could at double speed.

"I can still understand it," I thought. "Think of all the time I'm saving."

Today, I have the opposite opinion. Most videos — if they deserve to be watched — should be watched at single speed.

Let me start with the caveat. There are plenty of videos which can and should be watched at double speed (or faster) if they must be watched as a video. Some examples from my day job: if I had to listen through a committee meeting for juicy quotes or watch a talk on YouTube only partly related to a story I'm writing, I'd probably do it at double speed.

But I don't have to watch these as videos: I can instead skim the transcript of the video more quickly and retain more. More broadly, if a video can be reduced to a text transcript, I think it is usually more useful (at least for me) to read the transcript than to watch the video at double speed.

Thus, the videos that deserve to be watched as videos have some property that text does not have.

Why watch a video rather than read the transcript?

I can think of four main reasons:

1. Video is more entertaining.
2. Video can show more information than text does about the physical world.
3. Video gives the viewer space to reflect in real-time.
4. Video is easier to consume while multitasking.

For the first three reasons, I think that watching the video at double speed sacrifices most of the value.

Entertainment

Just watch the freakin' movie at its intended pace.

Information that text cannot convey

I'm primarily thinking here of tutorials/demonstrations of physical tasks (like replacing a bike tire), or other contexts where having visuals adds important information.

While it may be possible for the visuals to contain the same information sped-up, I expect that most of the time the video is most useful at its intended speed. If anything, when I'm watching a tutorial, I'll often want to slow the video down to see what people are doing more carefully.

Video gives space to think

I recently watched the latest ContraPoints video in one sitting. ContraPoints provides full transcripts for every video, but I prefer to watch them in their original format mostly because it's an invitation to think more carefully about whatever topic ContraPoints is talking about.¹

Watching at double speed ruins this. Instead of processing the information and being able to think at the same time, I have to spend all of my effort keeping up with the flow of the argument.

Another example is 3Blue1Brown, a math YouTuber.² I could conceivably watch their videos faster, but then I'm less likely to fully grasp the intuition they are trying to communicate. It takes time to think through what the video is saying; playing the video faster is not a shortcut to immediate understanding.

Multitasking

Multitasking is much more compatible with watching a video at double speed.

For instance, if there's potentially some valuable information in a video, I could listen while doing some other task and only pay closer attention if the segment seems important. While the transcript is faster to read, it also prevents me from doing anything else.

Still, this is a fairly small portion of the videos I watch.

Notes