Too busy or No time to watch videos. Do many of you watch videos in 1.5x speed or higher?

Okay this here though.. I feel is perhaps overshooting a bit.

This is a feature of personal preference, a convenience option. Now I'm 100% okay with that being a feature for that reason but you don't need to listen to something faster the same way someone may need subtitles or descriptive audio.

@efesell: Some people *need* to live their lives a quarter mile at a time.

I tend to leave GIant Bomb videos and podcasts running as ambient background noise, like a radio show. It doesn't matter if I miss parts as I'm not objectively seeking out any specific information, it's mostly just something I can fall back on when work is slow. So for my purposes, speeding them up undermines their purpose and it doesn't matter if I fall behind or skip entire episodes. People who feel the need to consume every second of content buzz me out, honestly.

If I'm interested in a new purchase I'll usually read an objective review on one of the big corporate sites, then find some non-commercial gameplay on youtube, and then maybe throw on a Quick Look just for flavour, but I've usually already made up my mind by the time Giant Bomb has got their shit together :P

I do with a lot of videos, but no all of them. Honestly there's just too much content I want to watch, and not enough time. If I really care about something, or if it's something I'm going to struggle to understand at a faster speed, I'll still watch at normal speed.

I get what you're saying here, but I made this argument intentionally. It would be pretty bizarre to design an app that let the user slow down audio but not speed it up, right? I mean, you already did the work, why not let other people benefit from it? Do we check to make sure people are deaf before we let them turn on subtitles? I mean, "Speed controls for auditory output" are even included on this Wikipedia list as an example of something that all users benefit from (notice it doesn't say "slowing down audio output", though you may feel that is implied.) Who are you to say that I don't need to speed up audio for it to be accessible to me? I mean, what is need anyways? Are you really willing to say "you shouldn't speed up something, even if it makes it more enjoyable to you, because you don't have a specific disability"? What if being unable to speed up the audio makes me skip something I otherwise might listen to?

One thing I've learned about accessibility features is that people who don't "need" them may nonetheless find them useful - I first noticed this in college where most of my friends asked for subtitles to be turned on even though nobody needed it. The reality is that accessibility features are not always developed purely through the kind-hearted efforts of developers - they have to be specifically requested and used to justify their continued development. Once I stopped seeing accessibility features as something for other people to use and me to ignore and started seeing them as something for anyone to use should they find it helpful it really changed how I think about stuff like this.

Edit: I'm not trying to be obtuse, of course someone who can't process the language as well as the average person "needs" the ability to slow down audio more than I "prefer" to speed it up - but my point is, nobody actually benefits when you make that distinction

I do think the distinction matters though. It should be that certain features are thought of as necessities and I think it's detrimental to have too many things just sort of mixed in as vague quality of life options.

I'm not out here trying to tell you that you shouldn't have the option available to you because you don't need it, it just hits my ear wrong to compare it to a matter of accessibility.