YouTube Premium subscribers get a sleep timer
Ever find yourself falling asleep to a YouTube video only to wake up hours later with your history filled with auto-playing next video after auto-playing next video? Well, in that case you probably need a sleep timer, and luckily YouTube is now offering just after that, well, a set period of time. It’s not an earth-shattering feature, but it’s still bound to be handy for people who like to go to sleep with long podcasts or white noise playing in the background.
But it's limited to YouTube Premium subscribers. And it's an experimental test feature. And, perhaps most annoyingly, the test is only running until September 2. After that, the feature might make it into YouTube per se, shedding its experimental training wheels, or it could disappear forever, there's absolutely no telling at this point.If you subscribe to Premium and want to test the sleep timer out, head on over to this page and enable it. Once you do that, when you open YouTube on your phone or desktop you can navigate to the settings menu while playing a video to set the sleep timer to your desired interval after which playback should stop. It's as easy as that. Now let's hope this won't just be a one-off experiment and will live on.
YouTube Premium users can enable this timer from this page on the desktop, or through the “Settings > Try experimental new features” option on mobile. The Sleep Timer option will then show up in the Settings menu on the video player. You can set the timer to pause the video after 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes or till the video ends.
Once YouTube pauses playback, you will see a pop-up asking you to extend the timer in case you want to. YouTube has lagged the competition a bit in adding this feature. Spotify has had a sleep timer for a while, and TikTok started testing sleep nudges based on a preset bedtime last year. YouTube’s experimental feature page says the sleep timer feature will be available until September 2, but hopefully the streaming platform will make it permanent and extend it to free users.
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