YouTube is rolling out a few features to premium users that would make their watching experience a lot more immersive and efficient. Some have been rolled out already, while the rest are still experimental.
I only started using YouTube Premium not long ago, and it was just about then that they started to roll out some of these few features, and I was just experiencing the benefits of using Premium for the first time. Although it is not exactly cheap for most people—and they would rather not pay for it for that reason—it does make sense to give people more reason to consider it.
Some of these features are only available to users in the US for now, and only to Android users. They will be rolling out to iOS users in the coming weeks, however. And to be able to use it and try them out for myself, I had to use a VPN to be connected to a US server to enable them.
Jump Ahead
Premium users can now jump to parts of a video that they may be more interested in. I did wonder what that meant at first, but it really is just the algorithm running on artificial intelligence to determine the parts most people likely skipped in a video and basically skip them for you when you use the Jump Ahead feature.
When you double-tap on the right side of the video to skip, the Jump Ahead button should show up.
Although I tend to watch most parts of a video that I really want to watch, I think this feature could be particularly handy when you just want to grab what's important in the video and move on.
This feature may not show up in every video. From what I found, videos with a lot of views—millions—are likely to have this feature show up on them.
Ask
There is now a conversational AI to help users interact better with videos. Just right below the video, you will find the 'Ask' button, and it will bring up YouTube's conversational AI that you can use for the video.
Impressively, it is actually very fast and accurate. The first two suggested prompts you will find are "summarise this video" and "recommend related content." The AI responds really well to those two. And when you even ask it something, it provides even more related prompts you may want to ask it about the video.
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Uninterrupted Experience on YouTube Shorts
You can now watch YouTube shorts while you do other things outside of YouTube. When you try to exit YouTube while watching a short, the video is minimised into a picture-in-picture frame that sits somewhere close to the edge of your phone, and you can reposition it as well.
It isn't a new feature, though, as it was already available on normal videos. Knowing how the attention span of most people has greatly reduced, they have catered even more to it and brought it to shorts.
Smart Download for Shorts
Based on the kind of short content you watch, YouTube can now automatically download shorts that you may like. So you can now be away and return to find new shorts waiting for you to be watched.
This feature, too, is also available for normal videos. But I don't particularly like this one. I really don't see it as a great idea. I get recommendations, but smart downloads are a little bit too much for me. It could shake up my storage and internet subscription, both of which I monitor closely.
Redesigned Watch Page
There isn't much that they said about this new feature. It's supposed to make finding videos and engaging comments easier, but it's only experimental on YouTube web.
"You can now experiment with a redesigned watch page we’re building on web to improve your viewing experience and make it easier for you to find related content and engage with comments." YouTube on their official blog.
Posted Using InLeo Alpha
