Watching videos at 2x speed
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Philip Taylor noticed a new (to him) tendency of Vietnamese youngsters to watch on-line videos at 2x speed. He writes:
My wife recently "imported" four members of her family from Vietnam (her sister, the latter’s husband, and their two children aged 11 and 13), and both children can be routinely heard watching/listening to online videos at 2x speed. When I asked Lệ Hoa (my wife’s sister) about this, she said that in her experience it was pretty normal amongst Vietnamese youngsters. I now wonder if the same is true for other cultures and what the motivation might be …
I will say unequivocally I find watching most English films / videos at normal (1x) speed difficult to understand because the actors often speak too quickly and / or unclearly.
As for what their motivation might be for this bizarre behavior, perhaps they are impatient to get to the end of the story OR, and this was my first guess, they want to maximize the number of programs they can watch in a given amount of time.
Please answer Philip's query whether this practice exists in other cultures.
Selected readings
- "Speed vs. efficiency in speech production and reception" (9/11/19) — this post and the comments thereto speak directly and intelligently to the phenomena raised in the current post
- "So much to read, so little time" (5/5/14)
Jonathan Smith said,
August 23, 2025 @ 6:52 am
OK not movies and such, but brainless "information" yes. Elders like me adjust to 1.75x.
Scott P. said,
August 23, 2025 @ 6:54 am
I know people do this, but I struggle to think of something more 'brainless' than a movie that would be actually worth watching.
David said,
August 23, 2025 @ 7:05 am
I routinely watch videos in 2.5x speed, sometimes 3x, using a browser extension. I started doing 2x speed with podcasts and after about a week, your mind gets used to it. After doing this for 10 years, 2.5x is my default speed. I only ever return to 1x for music.
Fras said,
August 23, 2025 @ 7:19 am
I prefer to skim through the (machine) transcript when doing that.
Jonathan Smith said,
August 23, 2025 @ 7:29 am
Re: movies, rather like music, if you (are prepared to try to) regard something as art and not just as content to absorb, it would I think be weird to do this… and re: content, there are IMO still distinctions to be made, e.g., soccer news/commentary > 2x speed or just shoot me vs. Timothy Snyder History of Ukraine > 1x speed or indeed slower since I'm trying to think.
Christopher said,
August 23, 2025 @ 8:00 am
This topic was just addressed in an article in The Economist (Aug 13th 2025): "What’s your preferred playback speed: 1x, 1.5x or 2x?"
"Polling by The Economist and YouGov found that 31% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 listen to audio at playback speeds faster than 1x, compared with 8% of people aged 45 and over. …Netflix has a button to switch up videos’ speed in its web pages and apps. YouTube has a similar feature and recently rolled out a 4x option for its premium subscribers, apparently by popular demand."
Jerry Packard said,
August 23, 2025 @ 8:13 am
I’ll often speed up a movie or report to get through it more quickly, but the speed modification I most often use is to slow it down to 0.5 when watching professional table tennis to deconstruct the spin imparted by the player, especially when they serve the ball. It’s not necessary for tennis or pickleball, because the spins are readily apparent.
Jim Mack said,
August 23, 2025 @ 8:18 am
Some say that listening at >1 speed can help you focus, for instructional or educational material. This was the case made for 'varispeed' cassette players in the '70s, which used a rotating head to 'sample' the tape and therefore maintain pitch. Now, of course, the sampling is done digitally. Without it, a speedup is much less intelligible.
AnthonyB said,
August 23, 2025 @ 9:24 am
Many years ago I worked for Recording for the Blind. The cassette players distributed to our clients had a speed-up mode. The volunteers got to read fiction, history, etc. while I ended up reading law books and the like when not splicing the reel-to-reel master tapes. I can imagine why the users sped those up.
Eric Armstrong said,
August 23, 2025 @ 9:36 am
My son routinely watches at 2X on YouTube—fast videos means MORE videos in the time you have! And, like most folks of his generation, he usually has the subtitles on, too, so comprehension is not a problem.
Dave Orr said,
August 23, 2025 @ 10:24 am
Both my kids, American teenagers in silicon valley, installed extensions so that they could watch videos at faster than 2x speeds. They tend to do between 2 and 3x depending on the video.
I listen to podcasts at 2x, my wife listens to audio books at 2.8x.
So it's definitely not just a southeast Asia thing.
unekdoud said,
August 23, 2025 @ 10:52 am
I found that I can listen to some podcasts at over 3x speed… when I have the attention for it.
But for content used as background noise, the correct speed is "whatever is most comfortable", even if that means slowing it down.
Ryan Chang-Hill said,
August 23, 2025 @ 11:11 am
Some data I found on other cultures with speed viewing.
Japanese survey on double speed viewing:
https://www.cross-m.co.jp/en/report/trend-eye/20240306baisoku?utm_source=chatgpt.com
"Both men and women in their 20s and 30s have a high viewing experience rate of over 40% to 60%, but even those in their 50s and 60s account for 30% to 40%, indicating that double-speed viewing is not limited to the younger generation but has spread to all age groups."
Korean data:
https://m.sedaily.com/NewsView/2GV97S64FK
"한국콘텐츠진흥원이 발표한 'Gen Z 콘텐츠 이용 트렌드' 보고서에 따르면, Z세대 응답자 중 1.5배속 이상으로 시청한다는 비율은 27%, 2배속 시청 비율은 24%로 전 세대 중 가장 높았다."
("According to the 'Gen Z Content Usage Trends' report published by the Korea Creative Content Agency, 27% of Generation Z respondents said they watched at 1.5x or faster, and 24% said they watched at 2x, the highest among all generations.")
Victor Mair said,
August 23, 2025 @ 11:19 am
All right, we're getting lots of good information about the fact that plenty of people are actually doing this, but not WHY they're doing it.
Only Jerry Packard told us precisely why he sometimes slows down the speed.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 23, 2025 @ 12:06 pm
@Victor Mair: Exactly! Also, do we know about the effects on comprehension rates?
Chris Button said,
August 23, 2025 @ 12:09 pm
I hadn't even realized it was a thing until I was listening to an episode of Darknet Diaries. The host noted that anyone who normally listens at higher speeds might have trouble understanding the dialogue in this particular recording, so he recommended sticking to normal speed.
Duncan said,
August 23, 2025 @ 12:20 pm
While I'm in my 50s so not the target age group, I watch/listen-to a lot of youtube as my computer setup includes multiple big-screen TVs as monitors, and much of the time I have youtube playing full-screen on one of them. So I've some experience in this regard. Hopefully my comment isn't too long as a result.
An extension (Playback Speed, works for most media not just youtube) allows specifying playback speed by custom speed buttons, and I have buttons setup all the way from 0.01 to 20X speed, with several buttons close to 1.x (0.95 0.98 0.99 1 1.05 1.1 1.2) while either end jumps much faster (0.02 doubles 0.01 at the low extreme, while at the high end it's 12, 16, 20X).
Audio cuts out (on youtube at least) below 0.125 and above 8X, but at the low end you're effectively automated still-frame advancing and at the high end ultra-speed fast-forwarding (only sampling every Nth frame, especially on a 60 Hz TV monitor) anyway, and the audio would only be an annoyance in either case. Additionally, while the TVs as computer monitors are great that's what I spent my upgrade budget on so the CPU's a decade old and already struggles with 4K @ 60 Hz youtube not to mention the download bandwidth, meaning even 8X I'm often forced to drastically cut resolution to play it at all. (OTOH at that speed you're not seeing much of the detail in any case so the resolution isn't missed.)
For native listeners I believe it's generally agreed that thought is faster than speech and that Jim Mack is correct, speeds between 1.2 and 1.5X, for the typical untrained listener (higher once trained so 2X or David's default 2.5 sometimes 3X wouldn't be unusual), tend to aid in keeping focus, because unlike normal speech speed you can't let your mind drift or you end up losing much of the content.
What I've found interesting is that some of the popular learning channels seem to have already incorporated that fact into their editing and have apparently sped things up, at least for some portions of their videos, themselves. For someone who often speeds such content (when otherwise delivered at normal speed) to 1.25 to 1.75X, the effect is very noticeable, both because one can NOT speed it up as usual and because the delivery speed is artificially keeping one's attention just as it normally does when one speeds things up themselves.
Additionally, I've noticed some channels not only apparently edit to artificially speed up the content in general, but that they also artificially shorten normal speech pauses even further than the increased speed would on its own. This seems even more apparent than the general increase in delivery speed, because even at increased speed, pauses normally allow at least a short "take inventory" rehearsal of where one is, while with these videos, one's attention is *immediately* forced back to the content, without the "take inventory" time one would expect of a normal pause even at increased speed.
Personally I find both effects pleasing to some extent as they /do/ generally better keep my focus, but (like level-compressed music always outputting in the 80-100% volume range, no lower volume passages) also much more stressful to listen to, such that I not only have to pause playback occasionally for my own "take inventory" time, but also can't watch too many in a row. Tho especially the latter may well be age related.
Meanwhile, the effect of speed on music gets complicated. Of course naturally, higher speed means higher pitch, an effect I think first popularized by "The Chipmunks" records back in the 70s (late 60s?) I believe, but now the entire "nightcore" genre is sped-up high-pitched trance/EDM with its own devoted following.
But the speed-up/slow-down effect seen (heard) on youtube at least as rendered by most browsers maintains pitch using the rubberband library via ffmpeg, or similar. The problem here is "impedance matching" the speed-modified digital sampling speed to the digital sampling speed of whatever digital audio codec (DAC) to analog audio converter you're using, plus sometimes additional conversions along the way (say at the listener end for playback via a "sound server damon", or at youtube to hit various available bandwidth vs. quality targets). Particularly with lossy-compressed digital audio such as MP3 at lower quality and sampling speed, the distortion of the audio aliasing of the pitch/speed-modification can become *very* noticeable and (generally) uncomfortable to listen to, especially with lower-quality (but higher CPU and latency efficiency) speed-conversion algorithms as well. Youtube video sound tends toward these lower quality highly lossy formats in many cases, making the higher or lower speed you may /want/ to listen to the music at, uncomfortable to /actually/ listen to, due to the distortion. There are exceptions where the poster took pains to post in high enough original quality and possibly marked their content for high-quality conversion as I believe privileged channels can as well, but they /are/ the exception.
OTOH, for some "calming natural ambience" content like the sound of moving water in pretty much any form (ocean waves, rain, streams…), dramatically slowing down playback to otherwise unbearably distorted speeds is hardly noticeable, as if anything, the "rubber band" pitch-compensation distortion seems to add to the "flow" effect one tends to be after when listening to such content in the first place. That comes in handy when you're trying to make that one or three hour rain video last a full 8-hour-night's sleep. =:^) Just don't do that to "normal" music with actual beat timing or (for those of us that lived the original experience) you'll be reliving the excruciating pain of listening to a tape that sat in the sun too long!
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 23, 2025 @ 12:59 pm
Hmmm. So speed for focus? Does that mean that lectures and presentations benefit from being delivered at a higher speed?
Jonathan Smith said,
August 23, 2025 @ 3:35 pm
"artificially shorten normal speech pauses" > have taken note of and personally can't STAND this trend. have dumped youtube channels as a result (fine, to little fanfare)
Duncan said,
August 23, 2025 @ 6:00 pm
@ Jarek Weckwerth: Yes. Many lectures and presentations definitely benefit from some speed-up. Sometimes I'll speed up the delivery, then end up pausing to think, with the result being time about the same as 1X, but having already somewhat integrated it due to the processing pauses. Compare that to 1X without pauses, where my mind would have wandered and I'd have either the same or slightly less initial comprehension due to the mind wanders, but would not have had the processing benefit of the integration pauses until probably a couple days later, after I'd "slept on it" and had otherwise had time for background processing.
Alternatively play it at 1X or a bit under in the background, where it gets only that "mind wander" processing time while you're doing "real life" at 1X, and you probably don't get as much out of the backgrounded content unless repeated a few times, but particularly with content you need to know /something/ about but aren't personally particularly invested in or care about, you absorb "enough" of it for your purposes and level of need-to-know (which in my case and I suppose the case of a modern human in general, in practice usually means enough to intelligently duck-duck-go/google/youtube/wikipedia/whatever-query more information should some life event trigger a practical need to know more).
Kenny Easwaran said,
August 23, 2025 @ 6:33 pm
I've never done this for fiction videos, but I often do it with videos that are more like lectures. When listening to my own lectures that I sometimes record for some classes, I find that 2x speed is totally fine, and means that I can get through a 40 minute lecture in 20 minutes. I sometimes have to pause and click back a few seconds to catch something (especially when I'm trying to figure out precisely what moment to insert a link to a question), but it still saves a lot of time.
I've noticed that with some of my favorite lecture-y YouTubers, like Hank Green, he already edits out a lot of the half second pauses (you can tell by seeing slight cuts in the video), and so I have no interest in doing speedup. With some others, they're already talking a bit fast, so 1.5x is the level I go for. But when I'm doing the higher speed, I have to be actively watching the video, rather than having it in a secondary tab.
Lars said,
August 23, 2025 @ 8:14 pm
I have an auditory processing problem. 1x is already a problem, I'd never use anything more than that.
mdhughes said,
August 23, 2025 @ 11:16 pm
This is very common in US anime fandom, if you have subs on you can increase the speed to 1.25, 1.5, or 2x. It can be a strange experience to see an anime you've watched at 1.5, now played at slo-mo 1.0.
It's also common with podcasts, pretty much every podcatcher has speed boosts, and some variety of pitch adjustment for it. I listen to nothing slower than 1.25x, and some need much higher to not seem like they're some midwesterner wasting my time with um ahhhh and slow-rolling sentences. Spit it out! (I'm West Coast, but I like the rate New Yorkers talk.)
Youtube can depend a lot on the content, but I find few are harmed by 1.25.
Jenny Chu said,
August 24, 2025 @ 1:50 am
Why do we do this?
1. I subscribed to a series of training lectures which were very helpfully delivered by a patient gentleman who understood that his viewers might be from anywhere in the world and thus spoke slowly and carefully. I listened to that guy at 2x speed because they ended up being less infuriatingly slow that way. I started doing the same whenever watching a video essay, podcast, etc., where the people were speaking somewhat slowly.
2. At work I often was invited to mass Zoom calls where the purpose was to introduce a new project, explain a new technology, or provide an update on the corporate strategy. These meetings happened late at night for me in Asia and early morning for my poor California colleagues. So we could stay up late and listen for an hour… or we could watch the recording at 1.8x (my maximum understanding speed for these relatively fast talkers) and reduce the total working time. Why work for 2 hours when you could slash the time almost in half?
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 24, 2025 @ 4:02 am
OK, this is all very interesting, but my question sort-of still stands (perhaps because I didn't phrase it clearly enough). Is it a good thing to deliver a lecture at a higher speed, as in giving the lecture in real time/life (not recorded), and modifying the speech rate up (as the speaker)?
Philip Taylor said,
August 24, 2025 @ 4:06 am
Absolutely fascinating — I had never previously encountered this phenomenon/practice, and had initially assumed that it was restricted to Lệ Hoa’s two children (until she told me otherwise) but had absolutely no idea that it was so widespread. My very sincere thanks to all who have contributed to this thread.
Brad said,
August 24, 2025 @ 4:41 am
I watch many things at 1.5-2x, and listen to podcasts at same, and sometimes a little higher. Basically I try to find the sweet spot at which my comprehension levels stay high, and this lets me maximise the amount of content I take in. I also have ADHD so it helps me to stay focused; for most things, when I slow them down to 1x I will often get distracted and drift off, forcing me to rewind.
Of course, for more technical material I generally have to listen at a speed closer to 1x (and often pause), just to make sure I'm really understanding things.
(I also utilise a feature most podcast apps have these days, which is the automatic removal of long silences.)
Lynne said,
August 24, 2025 @ 5:19 am
I'm 50yo in Australia and speed things up.
The main reason is that there is so. much. stuff. that I would like to listen to, or watch. I would just never have the time. Like others – music is a '1x' exception for me, and fictional films. If you see me speed fictional movie up, then that would be because I'm somehow unable to just stop (sunk cost, or I will be quizzed by a friend).
I indulge in many podcasts, documentaries, audio books. It is rare that I need to go backward and check something at normal speed. If that happens with one of my regular podcasts, then the speakers sound like they are drunk, stoned, or both.
Visuals I started doing this much later than audio. I suspect that could be because there is more to process.
Observing this in public, or comparing notes with friends makes me think that using headphones makes this more acceptable when other people are around, or in situations such as housing with thin walls. I'm not sure how accurate that suspicion is.
Jerry Packard said,
August 24, 2025 @ 8:52 am
As one might guess, advertisers take great advantage of speed-up/slow-down when they produce their content. The most obvious example of this is the required inclusion of various types of information such as side effects, legal information etc., which are sped up, have inter-word interval times reduced etc., because while they are required by law to include such information, the laws don’t stipulate degree of audio resolution. The same applies to visual, which is why none of us can read the TV fine print unless we take a screen shot.
Mehmet Oguz Derin said,
August 24, 2025 @ 3:26 pm
Born in 2000 (25 y/o right now, Turkish), I also find myself hitting 1.5x (Netflix max) – 4.0x (YouTube max) often. Primarily because with recent STT tech, subtitles are reliable, and this pairs the visual flow with reading speed, and since content is not live, the ability to recap where I want to follow steps. Another thing is that this ability to "compress time" makes it possible to use the same duration for multiple takes on the same topic from different instructors or content creators.
dr.shred said,
August 24, 2025 @ 8:59 pm
I can add that it's also very common for Vietnamese content creators to add sped-up narration into their actual videos – usually pitched up.
Two reasons why they do it which are simple but haven't been explicitly mentioned:
– it grabs attention (and perhaps relatedly, people listen to their phones in public ubiquitously)
– everyone else is doing it
Chas Belov said,
August 25, 2025 @ 4:06 am
American, not so young.
I usually watch at 1x. If the content is too draggy, I may up it to 1.25x but after that the artifacts become annoying.
At the suggestion of a book I read on different ways to listen to music, I occasionally have listened to faster pieces at 0.75x, but again 0.5x tends to introduce artifacts.
thud said,
August 25, 2025 @ 6:23 am
Born in '92, French, I listen to everything "non-artistic" (educational/informational content, lectures, vocal messages, podcasts, etc. but not movies or songs) at x2-4 speed, or whatever the max is allowed by app settings, plus subtitles (autogenerated ones are enough). I just lose focus below that.
It's easy to blame the ubiquity of screens, general attention span loss, and so on, but even when I was a screen-less student in the aughties/early 10s I would very quickly get bored at traditional lectures. People just speak too slowly, I guess
Philip Taylor said,
August 25, 2025 @ 9:09 am
Thud — "People just speak too slowly, I guess" — perhaps for you, perhaps for many. But while I have frequently said to my wife "Don't gabble — speak slowly and clearly", I have never once said to her "Speak quicker, I'm getting bored …" !
cM said,
August 25, 2025 @ 9:26 am
For factual video, I'm in the 2×–3× camp. It depends a bit on the speakers: Some are very clearly comprehensible at 3×, some occasionally require slowing down to 1.75×. The reason can be either enunciation or speed of speech. Once in a while a particularly slow speaker merits a 3.5×
And very rarely, the actual subject matter requires slowing down below 1.75× because the information transmitted is so dense that I need the time to think to properly follow along. I cherish those.
But in any case, the established default speed of verbal information transport in documentaries (there's surprisingly little variation) is excrutiatingly slow for me. This goes for all the languages I understand, none of them from Asia.
Duncan said,
August 25, 2025 @ 10:52 am
@ Jarek Weckwerth: Indeed I didn't catch that your question was *deliverer* perspective, about *live* content, probably because honestly, I'm skeptical enough about "live" speed-ups that I automatically discounted that possibility.
After all, isn't it well accepted on LL that "filled pauses" occur for a reason and are observed to be nearly universal in live speech? That being so, without quite some training, surely the effect of speeding up live delivery can only be even more need for filled pauses while the speaker's brain and vocals re-sync. Doesn't that defeat the purpose?
Perhaps it'd work for well-rehearsed delivery, but arguably that's actually prerecorded if only in the speaker's brain, so not "live"?
Point-of-fact I'd consider filled-pause prevention training a probably better initial time/effort investment, and if I'm not mistaken I've seen mention (on LL) of such training as a real thing available today. Also, I'd consider efforts at more dynamic delivery, both vocally, and including visuals such as gestures and illustrations (vocal and visual), likely more effective. After that, /maybe/ in the context of "advanced public speaking" training/personal-effort?
Also consider the effect of delivery speed on note-taking. I can't imagine effectively note-taking with any of my 2X or even 1.5X playbacks. Tho in practice I'm usually an "in my head" note-taker…
Actually I think I stumbled upon something there. For me as an "in my head" note-taker at least, /most/ of the 1.25-2X speed benefit I see is probably because the forced focus makes my "head notes" that much more complete. Combine that with pauses "to catch up" and for integration, and it surely accounts for almost /all/ of the comprehension benefit I('m convinced I) get. I'm honestly not sure of the implications for someone who routinely takes traditional notes??
So any traditional note-takers here who speed-watch/listen? Effect of that on note taking, both need and ability?
KeithB said,
August 25, 2025 @ 3:09 pm
This would have to be impossible with something like "The Front Page", the actors are *already* speaking twice as fast!
Warren said,
August 25, 2025 @ 3:48 pm
I [almost] always watch/listen to YouTube videos and podcasts at 1.5-2x
Because the narration/conversation is too slow, they spend too much time hemming and hawing to get to the point, or similar
Movies and TV shows? No – but I am also watching them for entertainment and/or with people, vs for information (and, occasionally, background noise)
Josh R. said,
August 25, 2025 @ 6:49 pm
I myself could not and would not ever watch or listen to something at greater that 1x speed Nor does my wife (Japanese). Nor does our daughter (8 years old), *except* that one of her favorite things to watch are vocaloid videos. And while these play at regular speed, even at that speed the dialogue has been speed up to at least 1.5x, if not 2x. I can follow the content to a certain extent, but cannot get past my annoyance at the high speed. My daughter, however, finds no difficulty in following the info, and no issue with the speed.
With more and more young people across cultures getting used to consuming media this way, I foresee a future where this will hit critical mass, when media will be automatically sped up to meet the new market demand. I'm probably setting myself up to be an old curmudgeon (and *definitely* dating myself with this reference), but it just reminds me of the blipverts in the pilot episode of the Max Headroom series.
ohwilleke said,
August 25, 2025 @ 7:12 pm
I routinely watch content that is repetitive or just has low content density at 2x, and I'm in my 50s.
Often, I wouldn't watch it at all at 1x because that is about half the pace at which I would read similar material in print, so if I don't watch it speeded up, it's not worth it to watch a video.
Also, another reason that I watch sped up is that I may have only a ten or fifteen minute time period available to watch something before I need to move onto something else (e.g. killing time before a Zoom call that I'm well prepared for). So, if I don't speed it up, I won't finish it without a big gap between watching sessions.
I don't watch at 0.5x speed very often at all, but I do use the pause button regularly and will sometimes back up a few seconds to watch something if it went by too fast (especially material with subtitles or complex dialog).
I also have something of an aversion of sit-coms and will sometimes pause to recover from and overcome the cringe that I empathize the characters experiencing, before going forward again, even though this means it can take much longer to watch an episode of one, when I know that overall it is worth watching.
Victor Mair said,
August 25, 2025 @ 10:53 pm
Josh R. mentioned "blipverts in the pilot episode of the Max Headroom series.".
I don't think I've seen it mentioned on Language Log or elsewhere in the last few decades, although I myself experienced it decades ago in movies and / or television — this was long before the internet, namely, subliminal power of suggestion / advertisement by microsecond insertion of a word or an image.
Does anyone else remember that stage of psychological manipulation? It really offended me because I felt the perpetrators were messing with my mind without my permission and, according to their intention, without my awareness.
The problem in my case is that my sentience is ultrafast, and I would often see things in movies that friends who accompanied me were completely oblivious of.
IG said,
August 26, 2025 @ 1:00 am
Like most commenters above, I listen at x1.5-x3 speeds, but I wanted to add a bit of a perspective from a non-native speaker. My first language is Russian, and I find that any educational or informational content in Russian tends to be impossibly slow, so much that it just becomes a waste of time to listen to it on any speed lower than x2.
Philip Taylor said,
August 26, 2025 @ 3:25 am
"Does anyone else remember that stage of psychological manipulation ?" — I do indeed, Victor, and am fairly sure that it was ruled illegal in some jurisdictions.
thud said,
August 26, 2025 @ 5:48 am
@Philip Taylor
I would argue that the context you describe is quite different. When in conversation with loved ones, friends, or even just when socializing in general, all of the nonverbal cues are as important (if not more) as the actual words being said, in which case the amount of information can be in fact overwhelming even at 1x speed.
Likewise, in a literary or otherwise artistic context, one wants to go slowly in order to fully appreciate the intent behind each word, maybe the sound of the words themselves, the intertext, and all that stuff.
But here we are describing "content consumption": podcasts, lectures, vocal messages, etc. where almost all of the information lies in the words themselves. In this case I want to process the information at the same speed as I would reading, which is often 3-4x faster as the speed at which most people usually speak. Adding to that, most content creators are not exactly concise when trying to get their point across while speaking: they ramble, repeat themselves, use roundabout turns of phrases when simple ones suffice, etc.
Philip Taylor said,
August 26, 2025 @ 5:59 am
I confess, Thud, that I have difficulty in understanding the difference between "content consumption" and listening to my wife when she wants to tell me something (or when I ask her to tell me something). To my (perhaps naïve) way of thinking, they are one and the same … It is perhaps relevant that most things that my wife and I discuss are purely factual, related to the hotel, the café, the house, a car she is thinking of buying and so on. Is not the "content" that you are consuming equally factual, and do you not desire a clear understanding of what is being communicated ?
VVOV said,
August 26, 2025 @ 6:16 am
Mid 30s here. I do *not* like to speed up videos, but most of my similar aged friends seem to do so at least sometimes.
If I want to consume the content of a lecture, interview, etc more quickly than the 1x video pace, I prefer to just read the transcript, which as other commenters have noted, is a commonly available option now due to good STT software. In general, I find text to be a more pleasant medium than video for content that just consists of 1-2 people talking without significant visuals, music, etc.
Philip Taylor said,
August 26, 2025 @ 7:42 am
VVOV — "In general, I find text to be a more pleasant medium than video for content that just consists of 1-2 people talking without significant visuals, music, etc." — I would go further than that. In general, I avoid almost all YouTube links proposed by Google when I am searching for information, preferring always to get my answers as prose rather than as video+audio (whether or not accompanied by "significant visuals, music, etc"). Of course, there are some questions where video footage can be helpful (e.g., "How to remove the left-hand HID bulb in a 2004 S-type") but even then I do like to get the instructions in prose as well as in video format.
Yves Rehbein said,
August 26, 2025 @ 12:52 pm
@ Philip Taylor, corollarily, I heard that books sell more than streaming and games in revenue combined, a few years ago. I find it difficult to connect that to the topic. The "normal speech pauses" mentioned by Duncan and Jonathan Smith may signal turn-taking in regular discourse. As Duncan says, "pauses normally allow at least a short "take inventory" rehearsal of where one is".
John Swindle said,
August 26, 2025 @ 1:23 pm
As an oldster I turn up the speed on lecture-type content, but with captions enabled and sound off. That's if the material or captions are in my native language.
On the other hand, for something like news stories in a language I don't know very well, I've sometimes left the sound on and slowed it down a little.
Philip Taylor said,
August 26, 2025 @ 1:30 pm
Is it perhaps the case, Yves, that books "sell more than streaming and games in revenue" because the latter are both internet-based and therefore more likely to be hackable, whereas books are physical entities and unless one is an out-and-out thief one has little option but to purchase them if one wants them. Certainly I buy at least one book a week, but apart from my subscription to Amazon Prime I pay for no streaming services (because I don’t want or need them) and my last expenditure on games was for a new set of Go stones about ten years ago …
Jerry Packard said,
August 28, 2025 @ 6:49 am
Speeding up the audio feed is a good tool for 2nd language acquisition. As the learner gains competence in the 2nd language, speeding up the feed and trying to get the gist is a good way to sharpen listening comprehension skills.
Lameen said,
August 28, 2025 @ 10:00 am
This approach had already been anticipated in 1995 – see Douglas Coupland's Microserfs:
No idea whether this was just gentle mockery of coders' obsession with efficiency, or was inspired by something Coupland actually witnessed.
Keith said,
August 29, 2025 @ 1:54 am
I often watch instructional or informational YouTube videos (metalworking, woodworking, cooking, building, pre-industrial crafts) at 1.5x, 1.75x or 2x speed. There is often a period of setting up or explanation of the task at hand and a few sketches showing the dimensions, angles and so on, then the nitty gritty of heating, hammering, sawing, chiselling, machining and so on.
If I find the preparatory steps particularly interesting, I'll pause the video for a second or two to see better and maybe make a sketch for future reference.
The reason for watching at higher speeds is that much of the video is repetitive (some YouTubers will accelerate, in any case, certain steps such as working at a lathe) and I prefer to watch two or three 15 minute videos accelerated rather than just one at normal speed.
I find the pronunciation in some videos particularly difficult to understand; sub-titles can *sometimes* help, but the auto-generated sub-titles can make a real mess of some words (I'm looking at you, Americans).