YouTube will show a video’s most replayed parts and is testing faster seeking

Abner Li | May 18 2022 - 10:43 am PT

YouTube is announcing a handful of updates today to its video player from a “Most replayed” graph to testing ways to quickly jump to sections you’d be more interested in.

YouTube will now show what the most replayed parts of a video are using a graph at the bottom of the player. As you preview, the thumbnail will note when you’ve come across a popular moment:

If the graph is high, then that part of the video has been replayed often. You can use the graph to quickly find and watch those moments.

Google has been testing this feature for some time, but the graph is more widely rolling out to desktop and mobile starting today.

Speaking of experiments, YouTube is trialing a way to directly skip to video moments that “you’re most interested in watching.” You’ll be able to tap or drag the seek bar up to see a visual timeline that can be easily scrolled through. Premium members will soon be able to test at YouTube.com/new once it’s available.

YouTube today also highlighted recently launched capabilities, like video chapter support on YouTube for smart TVs and gaming consoles. Announced in December of 2021, this applies to chapters that creators manually add and auto-generated ones. Google says video chapters have already been added to 20 million videos:

Our experiment data from May 2020 shows that, for videos where creators added chapter information, displaying chapters in the player increases the average watchtime of these videos.

It’s also highlighting the new fullscreen landscape mode that lets you quickly see video information and take actions (can like, dislike, comment, share, or add a video to a playlist). The company also noted the existing ability to loop videos from the overflow menu.