- Look out for a new Play something button
- It picks out a recommended video for you
- Some users are seeing the feature on Android
There’s an awful lot to watch on YouTube – more than 500 hours of content are uploaded every single minute, according to the official stats – and it seems YouTube is testing a feature to help viewers who are a bit stuck as to what to load up next.
As per 9to5Google, you might soon see a Play something button pop up while you’re using the latest version of YouTube for Android. Tap the button, and a selected video starts playing through the YouTube Shorts interface.
It’s not clear how YouTube is picking the video that gets played, but presumably your YouTube listening history and your recommendations are involved somehow. You’ll then get served more videos after the first clip has finished.
Although the feature uses the portrait Shorts interface, it seems regular YouTube videos can get played as well. However, it’s not something that’s gone live for every user, as Android Police reports – so you might not see it.
Too much choice
This is actually something YouTube has been testing for a while, though the interface has been tweaked a little along the way. It would now appear that at least some more users are seeing the feature too, if not everyone.
And it’s a feature that makes sense too: YouTube doesn’t want its users stuck on a browsing screen, not knowing which video to load up next and spending more time scrolling than viewing (or even switching to another app entirely).
While it may seem a bit random to have YouTube pick something for you to watch, remember the platform knows a lot about you and your preferences – it may even be better at choosing what to watch than you are.
We’ll have to wait and see if this new idea rolls out to everyone, but YouTube has been pushing out tweaks and upgrades on a regular basis recently – including skipping parts of videos and (for premium users) smart downloads for YouTube Shorts.