The new function for YouTube called “Jump Now” has been working for several weeks, while which will enable Premium users to skip to a certain part of a video. Initially, the access to the promised feature was limited to a small circle of users, as the developer chose to first test it on a limited amount of people, for which they still have a few months left.
Yet, the burning questions are: how does Jump Ahead work and for what purpose it is needed? This is computer vision technology together with machine learning that are setting video players to do skips automatically to “boring” segments, and seamlessly proceed to highlights. Of course, the mentioned ones, on the basis of user’s viewing data. Therefore, it was possible to gain an impression of what the users found engaging in the video.
Besides these two major groups, the YouTube algorithm has won more user attention as well, which means more users can give attention to YouTube ahead of the game videos.
YouTube hurried to this feature testing at the beginning of March in small circles in the USA. You can turn it on and off by just double-tapping the display if you are a Premium plan member. So do it! Double-clicking the video will bring the video forward 10 seconds (can be accelerated if there are several clicks), however when Jump ahead is engaged, a pill button will appear in the bottom right corner, which can be displayed for a few seconds.
In order to the accelerate video progress you will click on the pill after which the AI will choose the “highlight” and part of the video that is usually skipped by general viewers. In the images below, you can find out about the purpose of the learned custom.
Attempting some test runs in about two weeks, YouTube team is expanding the feature access to more users now. The user interaction can take place via the web services accessible through this page or via the app on Android devices visiting the “Try new experimental features” menu under the settings section.
However, this phase of trials is still for the English-speaking countries in the US only and not for their online videos. It too has the limitation where it is for that particular video which has been shared widely and looks to be easily identifiable. It doesn’t seem to be for every video on the platform. In the present rule, the termination date of the trial is now scheduled as of June 1, so we do not yet know whether after that date, the whole world will be the next destination for the experiment continuation or an official announcement of the feature release will be made.