At the ripe age of 20, YouTube is looking to speed up time — when it comes to video playback, that is.
As part of its 20th anniversary festivities, the video giant announced a slew of product tweaks, including one curious addition: a 4x speed option. YouTube first teased the feature in January and said in a blog post Tuesday it was “rolling out” for all Premium subscribers.
Non-Premium users can watch YouTube at a max speed of 2x, whereas subscribers — who pay $13.99 a month — can adjust their video speeds in 0.05 increments, ranging from 0.25 to 4.
Playback acceleration feels like an inevitability in a world of shrinking attention spans and strides toward productivity and peak performance. And on the surface, some speedier options make a lot of sense on YouTube, where creators can be prone to a sponsored preamble and are incentivized to make longer videos.
But are there really many use cases for 4x? I’m skeptical.
YouTube didn’t respond to a request for comment.
As a Premium subscriber with access to the feature, I tried watching MrBeast’s most recent video, and the latest episode of Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” podcast at 4x. To be fair, Donaldson is known for his jaunty narration and jumping straight into the action, while Cooper has a quicker delivery than many of her podcasting compatriots.
Still, both videos were completely incomprehensible. At 3x, it was still possible to make out sentences, but after 3.5x, everything started turning into a giant jumble.
Given that YouTube is a repository for all kinds of strange formats, there are probably some edge cases where 4x makes sense. Perhaps for extremely long videos without any talking, like timelapses or videogame walkthroughs? I could understand some ASMR slow-talkers at 4x, though speeding those up probably defeats the purpose.
Elsewhere, podcasts and audiobooks are common formats for altering playback speeds. But data from Spotify — which offers a max speed of 3.5x for audio podcasts — showed that 98.5% of listeners stuck with the standard 1x.
And Netflix offers a 1.5x option, which could be a boon for shows with little action like “Love Is Blind,” per my colleague Katie Notopoulos.
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