Google is testing out an interesting experiment with YouTube.
According to 9to5Google, YouTube is testing out an experimental feature (meaning it rolls out to a select few users before going wide) that would allow Premium users to automatically jump ahead to what they want to see. In other words, it would use machine learning data to determine what is the most interesting part of a video, and prompt users to go straight to said part.
In practical terms, this would work similarly to the double-tap trick you can use on mobile devices to skip ahead by 10 seconds in a video, except you’d be skipping to a predetermined part of the video that YouTube has deemed interesting. Many YouTube videos already have a little “most replayed” graphic to let you know where people are scrubbing to the most, so maybe the data to enable this new feature already exists.
Anyway, I haven’t seen this on my devices yet, so who knows when or if this will roll out widely. It would be another nice reason to pay for YouTube Premium, at least.
