After announcing some new experimental features for YouTube Premium subscribers earlier this month — and that multiple experiments can be tested at once — the company has added one it promised was on the way: the ability to watch videos at 4x speed, as reported by Android Police. I’m personally a 1.5x to 2x sicko when it comes to YouTube videos and podcasts, but 4x is an absolutely blistering speed that’s more apt for skipping past the cruft than consuming info at a faster clip.
The faster playback is just one of a few experiments you can currently try (with some OS and time restrictions):
- 4x playback speed (iOS and Android only, until February 26th)
- Shorts Smart Downloads (iOS only, until February 19th)
- Shorts Picture-in-Picture (iOS only, until February 19th)
- High Quality Audio for 256kbps sound (iOS and Android only, until February 22nd)
- Jump Ahead Web (for web browsers, until February 5th)
In similar just-get-to-the-point-already fashion, Jump Ahead gives web users a button to automatically skip to “the content they care about faster” instead of carefully scrubbing through a video. But let’s be honest, this will probably be a button to jump past all the intros and other bloat.
The faster playback speed and Jump Ahead features seem the most useful — if you’re already a YouTube Premium subscriber who doesn’t have to sit through ads, the next frontier is skipping through all the cruft. Though higher quality audio is always welcome. And a picture-in-picture mode for Shorts could be convenient, but as was mentioned on a recent Vergecast, why would you want YouTube to automatically fill your phone’s storage with tons of Shorts videos?
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