Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. I am Rock and today I will explain to you how and why the trend is no longer just binge watching, on streaming platforms, but also speed watching.
You are probably familiar with “binge watching”, the practice of watching a series in one go on streaming platforms, but have you ever heard of “speed watching”? This trend, which amounts to accelerating the content we consume via a dedicated function to save time, is now causing a stir among users of major audiovisual portals – foremost among which is of course YouTube.
Although the option to accelerate videos to different speeds has been available on the YouTube player for about ten years, it is proving increasingly popular, as noted by Neal Mohan, product manager at the subsidiary of Google in a recent blog post. If the latter does not dwell on the figures, he nevertheless argues that thanks to this accelerated reading, the users of the platform would have “saved” no less than 900 years of videos each day.
Different consumption depending on the media
The latter notes, however, that the use of this feature differs depending on the media used to view YouTube. If users mainly watch their content at normal speed on connected televisions or game consoles, those who access the platform via their computer consume most of their videos at doubled speed, compared to a speed multiplied by 1.5 for those who use their smartphone.
Another interesting phenomenon, Google teams point out that the average reading speed accelerates over the day. In the morning when you wake up, the speed remains normal. Then it increases when the working day begins. YouTube then notes a slight drop in use between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m., at dinner time, before a recovery which generally lasts until 1 a.m. among Internet users who enjoy a speed multiplied by 1.5.
If this trend says a lot about the new ways of consuming content on the major streaming platforms, it also represents an opportunity for content creators. It is up to them to produce new creative formats to surf on the attraction of new generations of spectators for speed.