Programming :: Redirection From A File To Command?

I am always confused about the redirection operator <Lets say i have a file input.txt that contains one word "hello" without the quotes when i do the following why don't i see any output? $echo < input.txt Secondly, i am slightly confused between input redirection < and pipe | operator. Sometimes they seem to do the same thing. For example i can achieve the output from the above command as follows $ cat input.txt | xargs echo