Universities are putting lecture recordings online for nothing, and this is being described as a threat to universities. It is not, because a lecture is the least valuable thing a university sells.
Think about what a lecture actually is. One person delivering broadly the same material they delivered last year, to a room, with no interaction beyond the occasional question. It is the most replicable component of the entire arrangement, which is exactly why it is the part that got recorded first. Nothing is lost in the recording because nothing much was happening in the room.
What does not survive the transfer is everything that is expensive.
Somebody reading your work and telling you specifically where your reasoning failed. The question you cannot formulate well enough to type into a search box, answered by a person who recognises the confusion behind it. The other students, who are half the education and the entire reason anyone finishes. And the certificate at the end, which is what an employer is actually buying.
A university sells accreditation, a cohort, and attention. It gives lectures away because lectures were always the loss leader, and now the marginal cost of distributing them has fallen to nothing.
So the institutions doing this are not being generous or reckless. They are advertising, at almost no cost, using material that was sitting on a hard drive.
The genuine beneficiaries are people who were never going to enrol anywhere. Somebody who wants to understand linear algebra at thirty-four, with no intention of a degree, has been handed something that did not previously exist at any price. That is a real gain and it should not be undersold just because it does not disrupt anything.
The number I would want before believing any stronger claim is how many people finish. Downloads will be enormous and completion will be miserable, and the first figure will be quoted while the second is not collected. Learning something difficult without a deadline, a cohort, or anybody expecting anything from you is extremely hard, and the recording does nothing about that.