YouTube after hearing out from users around the world that they want easier ways to preview videos and watch it on the go, has now finally decided to launch an all-new feature to the YouTube app known as Autoplay on Home. Google released an autoplay feature in the home tab for the YouTube Premium app quite some time back, and the feature is finally set to be implemented on the free version as well.
While it does not offer the same background playback feature that Premium users have access too, it will allow you to view videos directly on the home tab without needing to go to the dedicated landing page of any video.
The new feature will definitely increase the view counts of YouTube videos even if users do not actually see the content. Google revealed that the decision behind implementing the feature mainly had to do with offering an easier way of viewing content on mobile with minimal navigation. Users do not have to worry about accidentally playing videos out loud randomly as all videos will be muted by default and will have captions enabled.
When it comes to YouTubers, they can now take advantage of the new algorithms and create videos in a way that they are attractive enough to draw people from the home page to their channel. Engagement metrics will definitely be boosted thanks to the new change.
YouTube product manager David Sharon delved deeper into the changes in an official video. He revealed that Google has been working towards reducing mobile data consumption and Autoplay can help users check out the gist of the content without actually opening up the video at full resolution and wasting data.
There will be three types of captions to categorize the autoplay videos internally – creator-uploaded, crowdsourced and automatic. With content creators spending a lot of time creating thumbnails, there will be a short pause to show off the thumbnails in videos before they actually begin playing.
Save your data
According to Tubefilter, AutoPlay on Home first appeared over a year ago under the name Play as you Browse. It will soon be enabled for everyone by default, though you can disable it through the options menu, or set it to only activate over a Wi-Fi connection to conserve data.
Videos won’t start playing instantly; you’ll have a second to look at the thumbnail and decide whether you’d like to tap it immediately. Google also claims it’s optimized autoplaying videos so they use much less data than they would if you played them full-screen.
AutoPlay on Home means captions are now much more prominent, so this is a good time to check out the subtitles on your own videos and make sure they’re accurate, using YouTube’s automatic, creator-uploaded or crowd-sourced captioning options.
Creator-uploaded captions: Nobody understands work better than their own work, that is why YouTube gives freedom to the creators so that they can add their own captions on any of their videos by going to Video Manager and clicking edit subtitles and CC and then add new CC or subtitles.
Crowd-sourced community captions: Just to make you reach a larger number of audience, YouTube has introduced some added features for your videos by adding the title, subtitles, translating into a few additional languages, descriptions and closed captions to videos. The caption before getting published are reviewed by both Youtube as well as the creators, and they can be edited anytime. You can enable Community contribution by going to Creator Studio, clicking on Translators and Transcriptions, Community contributions and then turn it on.
Automatic captions: YouTube is totally focused on improving automatic captions, speech recognition, expanding the training data, machine learning algorithms, as there is a notable leap in accuracy for the automatic captions. It needs 44 percent improvement in Italian and 50 percent in English, this has brought YouTube closer to the translation error rates. YouTube very well know that automatic captions are never perfect that’s why they have given an option to edit captions.
