YouTube testing out video chapters for selected videos
You’ve seen people on your social media posting about Dalgona Coffee so you go to YouTube to search for how to do it. The video you opened has this woman talking for 5 minutes about why people are going crazy about it when all you want to do is see how it’s made. You can always scroll to the actual coffee making part but there should be an easier way to skip the uninteresting parts and go directly to the part you need. YouTube is now testing out something that could make life easier for users: video chapters.
Android Police says that the chapters are already showing up for some users for some YouTube channels. What Google is doing is dividing videos, especially the longer ones, into chapters. This is based on the timestamps that some creators put in the description of their uploaded videos. They specify parts of the video like intro at 0:00, background on coffee at 3:00, ingredients at 5:00, etc. And based on the timestamps and descriptions, that is how Google will divide the video into chapters.
But if the video creator doesn’t put any timestamps, then Google will not include it in the current testing. They may be included in the future probably but for now, only the videos from creators that are good enough to timestamp will be included. The scrubbing timeline will be divided into sections and if you hover on each, you’ll see the chapter title as well as the progress you’ve made in the section.
It seems to be a server-side switch so there’s no way to force your YouTube account to have it. It’s showing up on the Android app for some users. Someone shared a screenshot of what he’s seeing. He’s running version 15.14.33 of the YouTube app but the video chapters are only showing up in one of his accounts and not for all just yet.
As for when we’ll see this rolled out for all users, that remains to be seen. Hopefully it will be sometime soon since a lot of people are blowing through YouTube videos now, whether to learn something, to be entertained, or to just scroll mindlessly through all sort of things. Video chapters would be particularly useful right about now.
