YouTube is introducing a new feature that will help users identify the most popular portions of a video they are currently watching, as well as making other changes to its video player. The company says it’s adding a graph that will make it easy for people to find and watch the most-watched parts of a video. This could be especially helpful for longer videos or videos that don’t have timestamps or video chapters to separate the different parts.
In the past, the feature was only available to YouTube Premium subscribers via YouTube.com/New, but it will soon be available to all YouTube users across desktop, iOS, and Android devices.
YouTubers often break up longer videos into chapters or link to specific parts using timestamps. The new graph is meant to make it easier for users to quickly find the most interesting parts of any YouTube video. These segments may or may not always line up with where chapters or timestamps would be, especially if, for example, some video parts go viral.
The feature could also help viewers find the most informative parts of instructional videos or in the case of gamers, the most exciting part. People who watch videos on YouTube will now be able to see this small gray graph as they use the red playback progress bar to move through the video. YouTube indicates that if the graph is high, that portion of the video has been viewed frequently. When you have reached the “Most replayed” part, the video thumbnail that appears will also indicate this.
YouTube is also adding support for video chapters, a way to break up videos that was first introduced in May 2020, to smart TVs and game consoles. Users can quickly move to a certain part of a video or watch it again by using chapters. To date, YouTube has enabled automatic generation of chapters and says that they have been added to over 20 million videos.
Single Loop, a newly-added feature, now enables users to set a single video to loop indefinitely. You may access this feature by selecting the option from the same menu that allows you to change the video quality, toggle the display of captions, and more.
Full-screen mode now has a new panel that displays information about the video, such as the description, chapters, and comments. This panel will also appear in full-screen mode. Directly from full-screen mode, users will be able to access these buttons to like, dislike, comment, share, or add a video to a playlist.
YouTube has also hinted that it will “soon” begin a new experiment that will enable users to seek out a specific portion of a video. Likewise, this will initially be made available to YouTube Premium users via the YouTube.com/New website.
