People Now Watch YouTube Videos At Faster Speeds
There are too many videos on YouTube to ever keep up with, so many users are trying their best by using the faster speed function. Yes, you can’t see them all, but you can see more of them if they run faster. In fact, the platform figures that people save about 900 years worth of video time per day by switching to one of the faster speeds.
According to YouTube, “YouTube currently supports watching at 0.25x, 0.5x, 0.75x, Normal (the default), 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x, and 2x. As you can imagine, most people watch on the default speed, but we found that when people use this feature, the vast majority of the time they choose to watch a little bit faster – in fact, this feature was used to speed up content more than 85% of the time.”
But it turns out that a playback speed isn’t static. People tend to speed up their playback as the day wears on. Says YouTube, “In the morning, starting at 6am, playback speeds weren’t used as often, but users started to dabble with faster speeds as their day progressed. There was a slight dip in usage around dinnertime, between 7pm and 8pm, before picking up again later in the evening. Looking at usage of 1.5x speed, users watching videos on 1.5x started spiking between 9pm and 1am in their respective time zones.”
And it’s different for other devices. “On living room devices like Smart TVs and gaming consoles, users spent the longest time watching YouTube at normal speed followed by 1.25x speed, whereas viewers on youtube.com spent the longest time watching videos at 2x speed. And for those on mobile devices, both iOS and Android users most often used 1.5x playback speed.”
Personally I haven’t watched anything at normal speed in a long time, and it seems like a lot of people are like me, wanting to get as much info as quickly as possible. Thank you, YouTube, for giving us that option.
