YouTube Is Testing An Autoplay Feature That Streams Suggested Videos ...

YouTube, always on the lookout for ways to keep people watching more videos and staying on its site longer, is testing out a new feature that could prove to be a honeypot for casual visitors: video autoplays, where once the video you came to watch ends, instead of defaulting to the usual grid of suggested videos, another video starts up.

The feature was flagged to us by Deepanker Verma, whose Indian blog Techlomedia wrote up the appearance of the Autoplay function. But it looks like it was in the works for some time. In August, the autoplay feature was unearthed by Google system enthusiasts, who figured a way to call it up by modifying YouTube's cookies.

We reached out to YouTube to find out more. A spokesperson confirms to us that autoplay been rolled out globally with a 'small percent' of users to the site while it collects feedback on the feature. (In fact, the illustration here comes from an avid YouTube user who lives in Fresno who is also in the test group.)

'With more videos coming to YouTube every minute we're always experimenting with ways to help people more easily find, watch and share the videos that matter most to them,' said the spokesperson. 'We'll consider rolling features out more broadly based on feedback on these experiments.'

As you can see in the screenshot, Google/YouTube currently presents autoplay as an optional feature. It's set to 'on' by default every time you open a new video, at which point you get an 'up next' dialogue on the screen before the next video plays.

Those who prefer not to see the suggested stream can disable it - although it seems you have to do this each time.

Autoplay: more like traditional TV

There are a few good reasons why it makes sense for YouTube to push a feature like auotplay more widely.

As we have seen with other streaming sites, one of the biggest problems with a large selection of content is being spoiled for choice: you can watch anything you want, but you don't know what you actually want to watch.

YouTube - like Spotify and Netflix - have been trying to come up with different ways of tackling that problem, including integrating social features so that you can see what your friends are watching; creating playlists; and using playlists made by others. You can think of autoplay as a complement to those for casual users who are less social or less organised, or looking for an even more lean-back experience.

In that sense, it is a format that feels a lot like the site's namesake: the tube, or broadcast television, where you are dealt a stream of video content on channels without much interaction.

Currently users spend on average 24.4 minutes on YouTube per visit, according to comScore - a number very close to the classic half hour of a TV program.

Right now it looks like the other videos that appear in the autoplay stream are just others from the YouTube catalog, but you can see how the format would lend itself to another piece of video content that YouTube already automatically inserts elsewhere: advertisements.

With video ads being a hot commodity these days, having a place where YouTube could insert an ad after a video as well as before the video effectively could double its inventory.