YouTube is testing an AI-powered feature that lets viewers “jump ahead” in videos

YouTube is testing a feature that will make its long-form videos easier to navigate. The latest video on the Creator Insider channel discusses a new option for YouTube Premium subscribers, who can now press a button to “jump ahead” in the video they’re currently watching.

According to the Creator Insider video, YouTube developed its newest Premium tool after seeing success with its other fast-forwarding features, including the “double tap” that lets viewers skip forward ten seconds at a time. The jump ahead button will use a mix of “user watch behavior data and AI” to locate “the next best point a viewer typically wants to skip ahead to.” The option to skip ahead only appears after a viewer repeatedly uses the double-tap fast-forward.

Right now, YouTube is testing the jump ahead button by running a “very small experiment” among Premium subscribers. Lately, that particular rollout strategy has become a common procedure for YouTube. The platform has let its Premium subscribers try out new features — particularly ones powered by AI

— before bringing those updates to the rest of its community. In this case, creators are also getting the option to employ the jump ahead button on their own videos, even if they aren’t subscribed to Premium.

YouTube previously employed watch data to identify the points in videos that viewers skip to most often. In some cases, YouTube users jump forward to move ahead to the next segment in a long-form video (e.g. skipping from one match to the next in a multiplayer gaming VOD), but as one Creator Insider commenter pointed out, the new jump ahead button will mostly be used to do one thing: Bypass ad reads for video sponsors.

No matter how the jump ahead button gets used, it will probably become a useful tool for YouTube’s most impatient viewers. Of course, they’ll need to get access to the feature first. Right now, it’s still limited to YouTube’s Premium class.