YouTube is getting more granular playback speed controls and a sleep timer

YouTube is getting a bunch of small but handy new features, like the ability to more finely tune your playback speed, new tools to collaborate on playlists, a sleep timer, and more.

For me, a person who has written multiple times about video playback speeds, YouTube’s new speed controls are definitely the highlight. With the updated controls, you can select playback speeds in .05 increments instead of .25 increments, giving you a lot more options for exactly how fast or slow you want to watch a video. Playback speed is still capped at 2x — maybe someday it’ll get bumped up higher than that.

The upgrades to playlists sound useful, too. You’ll be able to build collaborative playlists by sharing a link (or, in a feature “coming soon” to TVs, scanning a QR code), which might be a useful tool to let you collect funny videos with your friends. At some point later this year, you’ll also be able to have users vote on videos you include in a playlist, which could be a fun way to rank those funny videos or decide on what to watch next.

And if you like watching videos on your phone before bed, YouTube’s new sleep timer, which can pause videos after a set amount of time, might come in handy. You’ll be able to set the sleep timer to a wide range of options between 10 minutes and an hour, and you can also set the timer to stop playback when you reach the end of a video. YouTube initially tested the sleep timer as an experiment for Premium subscribers this year, but now it will be available to all users on mobile.