YouTube is home to content of all kinds, from short, fun videos to really long video essays. If you’re falling asleep, the latter ones can be annoying, and autoplay can just go on for hours without any checking in. Now, YouTube is trying out a sleep timer to solve that problem.
YouTube is currently experimenting with a new sleep timer feature. The feature, available for testing until September 2nd, allows YouTube Premium subscribers to set a timer to automatically pause playback after a specified time, ranging from 10 minutes to 60 minutes, or at the end of the current video. The point of this is to keep YouTube going for long after you fell asleep in front of your computer. If you didn’t stop it yourself or interact with the video in any way, then the video will be stopped as YouTube will just figure you’re asleep or otherwise not in front of your device.
The feature is currently available on both mobile app and desktop platforms, and offers a convenient way to control your YouTube usage before bedtime. For desktop users, the sleep timer option can be easily accessed in the playback menu. Android users might need to dig a little deeper, finding it under “Additional settings.”
While currently exclusive to YouTube Premium subscribers, this feature could potentially become available to all users in the future, perhaps even as a free addition. It’s an experiment right now, and experiments are always exclusive to Premium users unless it’s another kind of rollout, so if you want to try it out now, you’ll have to sign up for Premium. From there, Google will analyze whether or not to ship this as a final feature for YouTube users. If you don’t want to pay, you should wait until it rolls out for everyone.
Source: 9to5Google
