*Not really, but you could film stuff and display it.

Video is an electronic process for capturing images and displaying them.

Before digital video there was analogue video, and analogue video was perfectly possible without digital sampling, or computers. Heck, video pre-dates silicon chips and used to be done with CRTs and valves.

Maybe you meant "streaming video"?

I realize you're probably under 30 and don't remember "ye olden times" but nearly 90% of U.S. homes and every school had a VCR long before they had a computer. Widespread consumer video formats included VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, Laserdisc, etc. VCRs. I still buy some movies I care about on UHD discs and watch them in a dedicated Blu-ray/UHD player. Even the 'smart' TVs and streaming sticks most people watch streaming channels like Netflix on aren't functionally computers (no meaningful user accessible local storage, input like keyboard/mouse, CLI or windowing GUI).

In elementary school we learned from 16mm films almost weekly and watched Carl Sagan's Cosmos series and space launches on live on television (it was rebroadcast in the mornings specifically for schools). My junior high school had a television in every classroom and we watched live TV on PBS, NASA channel and C-SPAN. In the late 80s there was thousands of hours of educational video programming sent via direct broadcast satellite to 18-inch dishes at schools. In the 90s every grade and subject had hundreds of interactive video DVDs in large notebooks (four discs to a page in plastic sleeves) and multiple DVD players per classroom.

The peak installed base of VCRs in the U.S. was in 1999. Streaming video wasn't common in consumer households until well into the 2000s, YouTube didn't even exist until 2005 and most people had never heard of it until 2007. In 2010 Netflix mailed DVDs in envelopes to 25M homes every week. They didn't even offer a streaming plan until 2011.

There's nothing about video that uniquely requires computers. But as someone who's spent most of my life thinking about video technology, with patents ranging from analog days to the streaming tech you use today, computers have been extremely disappointing in terms of enabling any unique "learning from video" features that are computer-specific. In the 90s we realized that computers could make digitized video random access letting us sequence it non-linearly to make it interactive in response to user input. We knew that computer-enabled interactivity, responsiveness and real-time adaptation to learner progress would be incredible for improving video education. Yet the vast majority video content available online today is still linear in form. Even video that's specifically educational is no more interactive or user responsive than a 90s DVD disc.

Sadly, only two things have really changed about consumer video in the last 30 years: quantity and distribution. There's much more of it and it's remotely accessible on-demand instead of being limited by broadcast channels and storage media. But that's far more about communication technologies like broadband than computation. For a few years YouTube even had authoring features like interactive menus, conditional branches and scripting but removed it all because it didn't increase ad revenue. There are a few dedicated educational video authoring platforms which provide deep interactive features like conditional branching, viewer annotation, timecode-linked threaded Q&A and other ways to combine the strengths of advanced wikis with interactive video more than just linking from one to the other. Unfortunately, such content is rarely found outside high-end corporate training and some universities. In my opinion virtually none of the learning features computing could uniquely enable for video are in widely available.

But as a former lecturer, I also think the promise of interactivity is dependent less on the tools than on the people. Authoring interactive learning materials is difficult and while that interactivity is engaging, it's not necessarily great at getting a density of information out there.

The Socratic method is great, but that level of interactivity presumes in advance that you know what questions the student will be asking, otherwise it's just a dumb gate. Branching stories for interactivity are highly labour intensive. I suppose if you use AI you could generate a massive number of videos to cover branching learning, but that's going to still be an intensive operation, especially if you're supervising that.