YouTube is launching a new feature today, designed to help viewers find the most-watched sections of any specific video. Long-time YouTube Premium members may remember this feature. YouTube has decided to move it out of testing, and release it to the world on both the web player and mobile apps.
The way it works is by showing viewers what the most replayed section of any video is. When scrolling through a video, a graph will appear to identify the most popular section of the video. This will be particularly useful for those in desperate need to find the most-watched bits of the 10-hour Gandalf Sax Guy video.
If you feel like checking it out again, we won’t blame you. See you in ten hours.
Cherry-picking content
With the ever-present presence of TikTok, it makes sense that Google is honing in on the short-video market. The use of this new feature could steer YouTube creators in a specific direction when creating content. They’ll be able to see exactly what their viewers enjoyed the most, and what was mostly ignored. This could lead to shorter videos from certain creators, or even just the creation of more Shorts.
It will be interesting to see the landscape of YouTube after living with this feature for a year. It could do nothing, or it could influence content as we know it.
On the horizon
This isn’t the only update YouTube announced today. Others include a way to loop sections of videos – though this was added last year already. Today, YouTube introduced everybody to it.
Next, a feature described by YouTube as a way to let users “…seek to the exact moment in a video that you want to watch”. Whatever that means. This new feature will apparently begin testing for Premium subscribers soon, but with no dates mentioned.
At the time of writing, we couldn’t convince YouTube’s most-played feedback to appear for us, on either the app or the web browser. The feature is probably still rolling out over the course of today.