The Impact of Maximizing Content Consumption Through Playback Speed

Increasing playback speed is becoming the default for all content consumption.

We’re moving toward a society that maximizes content consumption through increased playback speed. The playback speed option is now ubiquitous on nearly every platform that hosts video or audio content. The ability to increase (or decrease) playback speed isn’t new. The option has been available for content like educational videos and audiobooks since the ‘90s. Humans speak at around 140-180 words per minute, but our brains have the capacity to comprehend information at 400 words per minute. This is why the playback speed option has gained popularity. It’s a useful tool to help us consume educational long-form content that has slow cadence, a lot of filler content, or moments that seem to drag on. Decreasing speed can also be useful when following along with educational videos that walk through an intricate process step-by-step.

The use case and value of speeding up educational long-form content — content designed to deliver information without artistic value — is clear. This is content we need to “get through” and increasing playback speed helps us get it done. I myself use the 1.25x speed as default when listening to educational podcasts or YouTube videos that are more than a few minutes long. Why wouldn’t I? I want to get through the content as quickly as possible (while still comprehending it) so I can maximize my information intake.

But playback speed is creeping into our leisure time — our entertainment. Many people, especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha, use this feature on streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu to speed up television shows and movies they watch. Netflix began testing the playback speed feature in 2019. As expected, filmmakers were outraged. Judd Apatow and Aaron Paul, among others, called out Netflix, likening the feature to a destruction of art, allowing viewers to take an artistic work and consume it like they would with other less meaningful content. Netflix released the feature anyway, citing improved accessibility for users. While slowing down a movie to 0.75x speed could potentially be useful for your aging grandmother, the feature has been widely adopted to “speed watch” content.

Advocates who use this feature say it helps improve pacing, especially at 1.25x speed, and that it doesn’t feel like the content they’re watching is comically sped up or that any context is lost. But for entertainment like television and movies, there is really no valid reason to do this.

The argument for speeding up content is that it saves time. But I ask, what does it say about society when we must rush through an activity that is meant to be leisure time? Are we really that strapped for time that we cannot afford to spend the 61 hours it takes to watch the entirety of Breaking Bad? At 1.25x playback speed, the entire show can be watched in just under 49 hours. The viewer gains 12 additional hours back in their life, but to what end? Are we looking to save time in our consumption of entertainment content so that we have more time to spend on more meaningful activities in our lives? Perhaps, but in this case I think the answer is likely “no” among those of us who speed up our entertainment. We’re not so busy that we need to streamline our content consumption to fit into our day. We use this feature to consume more content in a shorter span of time. We increase the playback speed so that we can maximize our content consumption.

We are in an era where maximizing content consumption is the goal for many of us, even if we don’t realize it. There’s such an abundance of content that it’s starting to feel like work to try and consume it all. It’s difficult to dedicate a significant amount of time to a single piece of content when there’s so much content out there that might be better, or tickle our brains differently. Speeding through long-form content that is created to entertain us during our leisure time fundamentally violates the creator's artistic vision, stripping away the deliberate pacing, nuance, and emotional resonance that gives the work its soul. As a result, long-form entertainment content suffers as a medium. The availability of entertainment in quick bites is ruining our ability to consume long-form content without speeding it up — a natural progression of behavior that comes from our new short-form video consumption habits.

Social media platforms have gone all-in on short-form content, and destroyed our attention spans in the process. With the promise of fresh new content just a lazy swipe of the thumb away, we find it hard to stick around to consume content that loses our interest after just a few seconds. Because of this, there’s less appetite for long-form from audiences and less incentive for artists to create a magnum opus: a book, a film, an album. Punchy tweets, Instagram Reels, or song snippets are the new mediums that allow artists to get attention and build careers. This is putting intentional, artistic, long-form content on life support from a creation standpoint.

Even Substack, which began as a platform focused on long-form writing, has bent the proverbial knee to short-form content. This is evident in their Notes feature that pushes writers to publish Twitter-style content or snackable versions of their writing in order to grow, and most recently the short-form vertical video Reels feature. But we can’t blame Substack — they’re just giving us what we want: sound bites, headlines, straight-to-the-dome dopamine. If they don't, we’ll get it on another platform.

Short-form content, more specifically, short-form video content has emerged as the primary way to consume content, especially for Gen Z.

Now even Instagram and TikTok, the leading providers of short-form content, allow users to speed it up. Increasingly, short-form content longer than 30 seconds is starting to feel too long. These quick bites are no longer quick enough.

I started using the playback speed option when watching Instagram Reels as soon as it became available. Now when a video comes across my feed that hooks me in, I find myself glancing down at the progress bar at the bottom of the screen. If it shows me that there’s still a lot of video left to watch, I hold my thumb on the screen to speed it up to 2x. Why wouldn’t I? I want to get to the next video as quickly as possible to maximize my dopamine per session.

Speeding up content is profitable. Radio stations and television news networks have been digitally altering playback speeds for nearly three decades so that they could fit in more content and ads. The modern version of this, speeding up social content, is likely even more profitable for social platforms as users can consume content endlessly, and therefore be served more ads.

What began as a tool to help us consume long-form educational content is now used to speed up our entertainment content; both long-form and short-form. This means we’re beginning to make increased playback speed the default for all content consumption. This will only continue to degrade our attention spans and change the type of content that we collectively create. In this world, artistic expression takes a hit. Artists may opt-out of creating deep and meaningful work, choosing to make disposable content that allows them to build a career. The meaningful work they do create is sped through or all together ignored, as people prefer to spend their attention on dopamine-first short-form content. In our rush to consume everything, we risk feeling nothing.