YouTube Premium’s 4x speed and other experimental features now available to subscribers

After announcing some new experimental features for YouTube Premium subscribers earlier this month — and that multiple experiments can be tested at once — the company has added one it promised was on the way: the ability to watch videos at 4x speed, as reported by Android Police. I’m personally a 1.5x to 2x sicko when it comes to YouTube videos and podcasts, but 4x is an absolutely blistering speed that’s more apt for skipping past the cruft than consuming info at a faster clip.The faster playback is just one of a few experiments you can currently try (with some OS and time restrictions):

4x playback speed (iOS and Android only, until February 26th)
Shorts Smart Downloads (iOS only, until February 19th)
Shorts Picture-in-Picture (iOS only, until February 19th)
High Quality Audio for 256kbps sound (iOS and Android only, until February 22nd)
Jump Ahead Web (for web browsers, until February 5th)

In similar just-get-to-the-point-already fashion, Jump Ahead gives web users a b***on to automatically skip to “the content they care about faster” instead of carefully scrubbing through a video. But let’s be honest, this will probably be a b***on to jump past all the intros and other bloat.The faster playback speed and Jump Ahead features seem the most useful — if you’re already a YouTube Premium subscriber who doesn’t have to sit through ads, the next frontier is skipping through all the cruft. Though higher quality audio is always welcome. And a picture-in-picture mode for Shorts could be convenient, but as was mentioned on a recent Vergecast, why would you want YouTube to automatically fill your phone’s storage with tons of Shorts videos?

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