YouTube Rolls Out Redesigned Playback Speed Feature on Android, iOS: Report

YouTube announced several new and updated features in October. Among them were a new sleep timer, a resizable miniplayer, and some visual improvements. The Alphabet-owned video streaming platform has now reportedly started rolling out a redesigned version of the playback speed box. This is said to allow users to control the playback speed more intricately. This feature was teased by the company previously. A report claims that it is now coming to Android and iOS users. It is expected to be available to all users globally soon.

YouTube Playback Speed Feature Redesign

According to a 9to5Google report, YouTube is rolling out a redesigned version of the playback speed feature. The report adds that the feature is available for YouTube version 19.43 on Android and 19.44 on iOS. With the updated version, if users go to Settings > Playback Speed, a rectangular pop-up box appears at the bottom of the screen.

Within the box, a row of five preset speed options are shown as pill-shaped buttons — 0.25, 1.0 (Normal), 1.25, 1.5, and 2.0. Besides these, the box shows an adjustable slider. It allows users to fine-tune playback speed in 0.5 increments. The selected speed is shown above the slider, and adjustments can be made by dragging the slider or by tapping the plus and minus buttons on either side of the slider.

Previously, the Playback Speed menu opened in a long pop-up box that covered almost half of the lower half of the screen. The layout resembled the design now used for the sleep timer feature. Users were offered only specific preset speed options (0.25x, 0.5x, 0.75x, Normal, 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x, and 2x) to choose from. 

Notably, YouTube mentioned the “fine-tunable playback speed” feature in a blog post in October this year where it announced that it will start rolling out about two dozen updates across web, mobile, TVs, and YouTube Music apps.