It really depends. If you're conveying a dance routine for example, text is horribly inefficient, a short dance instruction video can be much better. I have th

It really depends. If you're conveying a dance routine for example, text is horribly inefficient, a short dance instruction video can be much better. I have the opposite for news for example. Essentially, whenever people read text out loud which I could have read myself, I typically prefer reading. Moreso because I can skim through text, and move back and forth to make connections, re-read a part after a new insight or to check if I'd remember it clearly, with video this is quite difficult and tiresome. Although I do enjoy audio/video played at high speeds, it's much more effortless to listen to or watch double speed video than it is to speed-read. Particularly because most written text is quite information dense and not meant to be sped through, whereas most video is more conversational, less dense, and can be sped up to a point where you can take in a lot of information in an easygoing manner in a short time. Then there's a unique section of high-quality production material. Here I would say, video can beat most formats, it's really efficient and makes a long-time impression. For example, a $5m documentary with video material for every anecdote, beautiful animated graphs to illustrate every metaphor, every causal-mechanism explored etc, can beat 100 pages of dry text. But it requires tons of effort and resources. On the other end of the spectrum is simple video material you see on television (point camera at talking heads), which is really inefficient (safe for being able to speed it up, but even then... whenever people are reading out loud news or an opinion, I'd rather just read it myself then watch someone do it for me.) But this format is really cheap to produce, it's just a camera and talking heads, but inefficient, I dislike it myself.