YouTube is testing a new way to let you easily watch videos at 2x speed

By wazup on July 17, 2023 Comments Closed / 88 views

This feature is made for sickos like me.

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

See our ethics statement.

YouTube is experimenting with a way to help sickos like me watch videos as fast as humanly possible. The test, which YouTube Premium subscribers can opt in to, lets you long-press on the video player to set the playback speed to 2x, according to YouTube’s experiments page (via 9to5Google).

To me, this sounds like a huge upgrade; currently, moving up the playback speed on YouTube can take a few annoying steps. On the mobile app, you need to tap the video, tap the three dots menu, tap playback speed, and then you can pick from the different options. It’s a similar set of steps on the mobile and desktop web. (Though, on desktop, you can use Shift and the less than or greater than keys to speed up or slow things down without digging into the menus.) The new feature seems to take some inspiration from TikTok: if you long-press a TikTok video, the app will bring up a bunch of different options, including a playback speed menu.

YouTube’s test of the long-press is available until August 13th, the experiments page says. I’m not a Premium subscriber, so I can’t test it myself, but I dearly hope that YouTube rolls the feature out to everyone sometime after the experiment ends. (And if anyone at YouTube is reading this, please let me watch videos at something faster than 2x speed.)