I’m increasingly distracted by YouTube’s increasingly aggressive display of ads before, during, and after videos, making it challenging to even get to the snippets of a video I want to watch without having a serious voice encourage me to trade stocks or go to Dubai. Until now I’ve been too cheap to subscribe to YouTube Premium, but that could soon change.
That’s because YouTube is apparently testing an AI-powered recommendation system that analyzes patterns in viewer behavior to smartly skip to the most popular parts of a video with just a double tap on a touchscreen.
“The way it works is that if a viewer double-taps to advance to an eligible segment, we show a Skip Forward button that takes them to the next point in the video that we think they’re aiming for,” YouTube channel that focuses on creators Creator Insider explained. “This feature will also be available to creators watching their own videos.”
Currently, such a double-tap action jumps a YouTube video forward a few seconds, which I don’t find very useful. And while YouTube does introduce a form of wave pattern on the video timeline to show what the most popular parts of the video are, it’s not the easiest to use and can sometimes seem lacking in intuitiveness.
So if you can simply tap to jump to the most popular part of a video, at least according to an AI, this could be a boon for impatient people like me. The only downside is that this feature is only being tested for YouTube Premium users and is currently limited to the US.
But such useful features usually get a wider global rollout once they come out of testing, meaning there’s room for Brits like me to get access to smart double-tapping of videos. That’s when I finally decide to take the plunge and pay for YouTube Premium.
