YouTube is undoubtedly the most popular site for long-form videos, and the Google-owned company is always adding new features to better the experience. In 2020, the video-streaming platform introduced video chapters to make watching longer YouTube films much more doable. Now, the platform is introducing a new feature that emphasizes the video’s “most watched” segments. Let’s have a look at the specifics.
All YouTube Users Now Have Access to a New Heat-Map Feature
This new YouTube tool, dubbed Heatseeker, was first tested for a small group of YouTube Premium users late last year. It uses a heatmap graph on the seek bar to emphasize the most popular areas of them. This allowed people to skip over the boring parts of a video and immediately watch the most popular or intriguing bits without having to watch the full thing.
YouTube has now made it available to all users worldwide via its mobile apps and online client. YouTube explained in a blog post that the feature displays a graph that emphasizes the “most frequently replayed areas of the video.”
The company also moved to Twitter to announce the same, as well as some other improvements (many of which are already live), such as a single Loop button for videos that can make a video loop indefinitely and a new full-screen UI for videos on its mobile apps.
YouTube hopes to give viewers greater control over how they watch long-form videos on the platform with this option. By looking at the seek bar, viewers can see the primary content of a long video while skipping the sponsored bits. On the other hand, it adds to the difficulty for artists to keep their viewers engaged for the majority of their films in order to maintain the graph balanced.
While the feature is currently being rolled out to all users, it was not available to us at the time of writing. So, if you find it on your web browser or in one of the mobile apps, please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Meanwhile, the YouTube mobile app on iOS had the new UI and the Loop button on the pop-up for YouTube videos. To get a sense of how they look, look at the screenshots below.
Every video you see on YouTube is saved. There are some compelling reasons to do so: you can easily locate and rewatch or share a video you recently watched by checking your watch history. YouTube also makes better suggestions for new videos based on your viewing history. However, you have total control over this feature. You can either pause or remove your watch history to prevent YouTube from knowing what types of videos you watch.
