YouTube Is Testing a New Way to Add Timestamps to Your Video Comments

YouTube is testing a new way to add timestamps to videos. This new update will let you tag the current time of the video while writing a comment just by tapping a dedicated icon. Additionally, YouTube is making it easier for creators to help viewers navigate to certain parts of their videos by automatically adding video chapters. The video streaming platform brought chapters in May to let creators manually add certain timestamps to their videos for easy navigation between multiple topics.

YouTube announced via an updated forum thread on its support page that it is easing the way how timestamps are added to videos through a new icon that will be available when writing a comment on a video. It will allow viewers to automatically add the current time of the video.

Currently, you need to manually put the time code within your comment to provide a timestamp on a specific video. The new update will make this process quite easy as you’ll be able to add timestamps to your comments by tapping on the new icon.

YouTube says that the new testing is initially limited to a small group of users. This means chances are high that you may not be able to get the new feature at this moment.

Alongside the timestamp-focussed change, YouTube is testing automatic video chapters. This will specifically help creators add video chapters to their videos to make it easy for their viewers to navigate to a particular part.

“We’ll use machine learning to recognise text in order to auto generate video chapters,” the company said on its support page.

Similar to the timestamp update, automatic video chapters will initially be limited to a small group of videos. Creators also have the ability to opt out of the new experience, or share their feedback, by writing to YouTube through a dedicated form.

Last month, YouTube extended video chapters to let viewers see a complete list of all chapters in the video being watched. The update was made for Android and iOS users.

Can Netflix force Bollywood to reinvent itself? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.