Today, YouTube is introducing a new feature that will help users recognize the most popular parts of a video they’re watching, as well as a number of other modifications to the video player. According to a blog post from the company, it’s adding a graph that people can use to locate and watch the most frequently replayed parts of a video. This could be especially helpful for longer videos or those that haven’t been broken down into their various sections using either timestamps or video chapters.
Formerly only available as an experiment to paid subscribers of YouTube, the function will now be made available to all YouTube subscribers regardless of whether they pay for the premium service or not.
The new graph attempts to make it easier for YouTube users to rapidly locate the most fascinating parts of a long movie by allowing them to swiftly skim through the video. Chapters or timestamps may or may not correspond to these portions, depending on the virality of the video segment in question.
To make tutorial videos more user-friendly, this feature might direct viewers to the most action-packed section, such as the most popular segment from a gamer’s video.
Using the red playback progress indicator, YouTube users can now see a modest gray graph as they skim through the movie. Using the graph, YouTube can tell if a video segment has been seen frequently. It will also show you when you’ve reached the “Most replayed” portion of a video.
YouTube is also bringing video chapters — the segmentation tool that was first announced in May 2020 — to smart TVs and gaming consoles in conjunction with this rollout. Using chapters, users can effortlessly rewind or skip forward to a certain point of the video. As of this writing, around 20 million videos have had chapters added to them thanks to YouTube’s automatic generation feature.
Single Loop, a new feature, allows users to put a single movie on an unending loop. If you want to use this feature, go to the same menu where you may change the video quality and enable captions, for example.
In addition, a new panel will now emerge in full-screen mode to display information about the movie, such as the video description, video chapters, and comments. From full-screen mode, users can access rapid action buttons such as “like,” “dislike,” “comment,” “share,” and “add to playlist.”
As a final note, YouTube hinted that it will be launching a new experiment “soon” that would allow users to search for the exact point in a video that they wish to view. According to the YouTube.com/New website, this will be available to Premium subscribers initially.
