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A creative and likely useful way to streamline your YouTube watching experience is potentially on the way. For now, f you’re a Premium subscriber, YouTube has introduced a cool new feature called Jump Ahead that’s designed to make skipping those less interesting sections of the video you are watching a very simple process.
Jump Ahead uses AI and viewer data to pinpoint the sections of a video most people tend to skip. In the experimental version that’s here for select YouTube Premium subscribers, the process to use it is pretty straightforward. Usually, you’d simply double-tap to skip ahead slightly in the video. With this experiment, you’ll now see a Jump Ahead button in the bottom-right corner of your screen when you do this. Clicking that button will take you to the next part of the video that is typically considered more interesting by the majority of viewers. When you tap the button, a “Jumping over commonly skipped section” overlay will briefly appear.
How to try it out
Jump Ahead is currently a perk for YouTube Premium subscribers that is rolling out to more users, but is still not here for all of us yet. As you can tell, I’m not seeing it just yet. In the settings menu of the YouTube Android app, you can look under the Try experimental new features if you are a Premium subscriber, are in the US, and only plan on trying this for English-language videos at the moment. Jump Ahead is slated to end on June 1 – but it could be extended, so keep checking for it.
This feature joins the previous (and still-available) AI-Powered Answers experiment for YouTube Premium subscribers. That feature is set to expire on May 21, but like Jump Ahead, it could get extended as well. I’d expect to see one or two more trials launched around Google I/O 2024 a little over a week from now, so keep checking the app and on the web at YouTube.com/new to see if you are one of the lucky folks who get to try out some fun, new features.
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