Video forums for free software

"Against"? Well, hardly. As I said, the modern industrial condition is nothing if not a
massive party of waste. Almost everything we do recreationally, by volume, is voluntary waste.
What sense would it make to worry about wasted bits when we're drowning in wasted physical
goods?

Comparison between phones and letters is not apt as phone calls are just transient energy
signals, not physical objects. Phone calls vs. the same message expressed as dense text codes?
Sure, absolutely wasteful. Why do you think phone networks are so much more happy to carry SMS
over voice streams? They charge you similar "get the message through" rates (say, a dime)
while saving almost all of the cost of transmission. When videophones are the default, heaven
forbid, "voice only" calls will be cheaper too, and text will carry even fatter margins.

Anyways, if it gives you hope for the future, don't let me interfere. I'll stick with text as
long as I can, but I'm a cave-person. 

Indeed, however much important it is to not exclude people lacking the required bandwidth
and/or cpu power, it's the whole issue of efficiency and wasting _my_ time. Talking about
time, it's more circumvent to time the speed in which to take in the information comparing
video to text+pictures.
I think it already has been pointed out, most people are better writers than actors/teachers.
Jotting something down also forces you to rethink and reconsider. Guess it's the 'gray beards'
all over again when I point out that educational institutions and students alike all over the
world still use... books. Yes, video shows up here and there, but mostly when they add actual
value to the process. 

I never watch tutorials, howtos, articles in video format. It's much easier to soak up the
information in a decently written article. If helps a lot of people if the article consists of
text plus pictures (screenshots or 'CLI shots'). Still one can time, copy/paste, forward,
condense, (dead tree alert) print & read somewhere else - no batteries needed, comment on,
search, etc. a text article in a much much more efficient manner than a
video/vodcast/screencast/webinar.

And that's not even considering the impact it has on indexing in search engines. Not an
unimportant part of our online lives.

And the person mentioning the telephone: how come we have video telephony for ages now and
almost no-one owns/uses one ? For the majority of people it plain just doesn't add much to the
communication.

I kind of suspect the whole issue of screencasts is technology for the sake of technology.
There IS a place for video, but looking at the majority of the screencasts out there i'd say:
not the place, nor the time.