Hacker News Reader

Our team is actually working to solve this very problem. Our goal is to make it way easier to skim and find the best parts of videos (and possibly audio later on). It's not visible on our site yet, but we have a really cool 'highlights' feature in the works that lets you quickly watch the key parts of several videos to determine if they're worth your time.

www.vuact.com

Any feedback appreciated!

That's actually really cool. I'd be curious to see how that works with music videos, too. I also wish, however, that videos had summaries of what actually happens that we could skim ahead of time.

I'm with you. Transcripts are golden, but if that's not an option, at least the Stanford MOOCs and Coursera got it right with the ability to increase the playback speed. Most talks lose nothing at 1.5x speed.

Depending on the talk, the elocution and delivery can be a valuable part of the work.