Watching a video does require little effort, but learning -- and subsequently retaining anything is where the real effort is required with technical subjects.
I totally disagree in some cases. I despise internet video most of the time, unless I really need an illustration.
A great example is news sites creating ~1 minute videos instead of just printing out the story. News is almost always better to read than to wait for a person to say it to me in a video.
I frequently will download all the videos for an online course. Subsequently, when I watch them in VLC [1], I'll bump the playback to 1.25x - 1.75x.
Fwiw: for me, playback speed strongly correlates to how technical the topic is, less technical videos tends toward the 1.75x; while highly technical tends toward the 1.25x.
I'm also a big proponent of subtitles and transcripts.
I'm glad you brought this up. This has tremendously improved my experience with video lectures. For online classes, I do the same as you mentioned utilizing VLCs playback feature. Youtube's addition of playback speed has also been a huge improvement in consuming more technical content.
