In March, YouTube started testing the new Jump ahead feature, and now it is available to a wider range of users via the youtube.com/new section. It is available to subscribers of the Premium version of the service.
Jump ahead is an artificial intelligence-based feature that allows you to speed up the viewing of long videos by skipping uninteresting and boring parts. To use this feature, you need to double-tap the screen, similar to the skip ahead command. After that, a new button will appear that «takes you to where most viewers usually jump ahead». The tablet-shaped Jump ahead button appears for a few seconds in the lower right corner and then disappears if the user just wants to jump forward 10 seconds in the video.
When you tap the button, you can see the overlay «Jumping through a section that is often skipped» labeled YouTube Premium. YouTube uses artificial intelligence and viewership data to determine the «next best thing» to watch. Thanks to the history of other users’ video views, the service identifies the most interesting and commonly skipped segments. Jump ahead allows you to fast forward an uninteresting segment and skip to the interesting one.
The feature is available to YouTube Premium subscribers in the Android mobile app in the United States. To activate it, go to Settings > Try New Experimental Features. Currently, the feature is only available for videos in English, but it is not «available for every video» and requires a video to have a large number of views. The experiment is expected to last until June 1.
Source: 9to5google