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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Wait. They’re turning movies into audio books. That’s a good first step.

Next to save bandwidth they’ll drop video and just display text on screen.

I often wonder about how much electricity is wasted (recording, encoding, transmitting, decoding) on videos where the video itself seems to add no actual value, and it would be just as effective as audio-only (or text-only) content instead. A study of YouTube videos in 2022 found that more than 15% of "videos" (i.e. billions of videos) contained only still images[1]. My wife watches a ton of short-form video (and in turn shows me the ones that she likes) and I'm baffled by how many are just scrolling text with people dancing in the background, or people holding up signs, or someone just talking into the camera (often sitting in the driver's seat of a car).

[1] https://journalqd.org/article/view/4066

> A study of YouTube videos in 2022 found that more than 15% of "videos" (i.e. billions of videos) contained only still images

Talking heads are equivalent to (badly written) text only content too.

Any video streaming application worth its salt will stop downloading the video track if the user backgrounds the application, turns off the screen or otherwise makes the video surface not visible, so there's no bandwidth wasted in that particular scenario. This is of course somewhat diminished by people not actually turning the video off in many scenarios - and I'm not even sure Netflix supports backgrounded playback, for that matter.

Additionally, videos of still images compress remarkably well, to the point where the image itself is largely the same size as the video track.

These are good points. You've made me feel a bit better about how much is really being wasted.

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