Watching later is often addition, not substitution

The assumption that every view represents an absence does not hold up.

The mental model behind most anxiety about recording is a simple exchange: one view means one empty seat. It is intuitive and it is frequently wrong. A substantial part of viewing comes from people who were in the room, returning to a section they want to check, replaying an explanation that went past too fast, or working through something in a language that is not their first at a pace they control. For those viewers the recording is not a replacement for the session. It is a second pass at it.

Once you notice that pattern, the recording starts to look less like a competitor to the room and more like a companion to it. It supports the student who understood roughly two thirds of a dense session and would rather recover the missing third than pretend otherwise. It supports the person managing a condition that makes sustained concentration unreliable. It supports anyone who takes notes badly under time pressure, which is most people. None of those uses subtract from attendance, and treating them as though they do penalises exactly the students who are working hardest.

The practical implication is that viewing figures, whatever they show, cannot be read as an attendance ledger. A high level of viewing may indicate a difficult topic being revisited, a well structured recording that people can navigate, or a cohort with heavy outside commitments. It is a signal worth attending to and a terrible basis for a policy about presence. If the question is whether people are learning, the recording is not where the answer lives.