Watch YouTube videos at 2x playback speed with this simple experimental gesture

There’s a way to watch YouTube videos twice as fast without the need for diving in settings and menus. YouTube is testing a gesture to switch to 2x playback speed on both mobile and desktop devices.

Boosted playback speed is this author’s manna from heaven, in regards to podcasts. Even if your favorite creator speaks fast and clearly, there’s always a guest with a different tempo that gets on your nerves. Now users can make slow-talkers act twice as fast with a simple gesture. The speed change comes handy in other scenarios, too: when you want to skip a certain part of the video, but you don’t want to miss too much of the stream by selecting random timestamps on the timeline.

Press and hold

You just need to press and hold anywhere on the YouTube player while watching a video to ‘automatically bump the playback to 2x’ (via 9to5Google). That’s for Android/iOS users. For desktop/web users, clicking and holding with the mouse/trackpad will do the trick. A message that reads ‘Playing at 2x speed’ at the top of the window will notify you, in case you don’t realize why things are going twice as fast.

There’s a substantial difference between mobile and web when it comes to what happens after you let go. On Android/iOS, the playback continues at normal speed after you take your finger off the screen, while releasing the mouse/trackpad leads to a video pause.

I need this in my life, where is it?

The ‘Long press to watch at 2x’ option, found in the dedicated YouTube page for experimental new features. Of course, should you want to give it a try, you must be a YouTube Premium subscriber. This feature is available for testing until August 13.

If the tests are successful, YouTube may roll out this feature for everyone in the future. Right now, if you need to bump up the playback speed of a video, you need to dive in the settings (top-right corner for mobile, bottom-right for web) while playing and scroll down some menus, until you finally get to the ‘Playback speed’ section.

As of now, if non-Premium mobile users (or paid subscribers that have not enabled the ‘Long press to watch at 2x’ feature) press and hold somewhere in the video window, the ‘Slide left or right to seek’ option appears. Sliding left or right enables a fast forward or backward seeking of the timeline. Desktop/web users do not benefit from the same function if they click and hold on the video. Here’s a little bonus for them: using the commands ‘Shift + ’ lets you change the playback speed.

There’s a Premium Lock Screen, too

That’s not the only new Premium feature that you can test until August 13. Check out ‘Lock Screen’: it ‘disables touch input while watching a video so that accidental taps do not pause, skip or disrupt the video’. This one is available on Android and iOS only.