If you’re someone who watches videos or listens to podcasts on YouTube before going to sleep, you’re not alone. Many users often use this platform before going to bed, either to watch a long video, a documentary, a concert or even to listen to ASMR videos to relax.
But ideally, we don’t want that playback to stay active all night, as the platform will jump from one video to the next. Now, YouTube has added a new timer to stop videos from playing after a time of your choosing has passed.
The new timer is now available, but for now only for a limited time.
This is an experimental feature, at least for now, which means that it will only be available for a limited time during testing, although in the future, we hope to see this feature reach all users of the platform. However, if you are a YouTube Premium user, you can already try it out; you just need to access this link and activate this experimental YouTube feature.
The timer is available in both the mobile app and the desktop version of YouTube. Its operation is simple but effective: after activating the timer, video playback will stop when the set time is up, so you can continue sleeping or doing whatever without any more videos playing.
To access the timer on mobile devices, we must press the gear-shaped button when playing a video on YouTube and then select Additional Settings. In this menu we will see the Timer option.
Screenshot: Xataka YouTube channel.
On the desktop version of YouTube, the process is even easier: just tap the gear button to open the playback options menu, and tap Sleep Timer. Next, select the amount of time you want to wait until the video stops playing: 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, or until the end of the video.
Screenshot: Xataka YouTube channel.
If, like me, you sometimes have a video playing in the background, or even turn off your screen to just enjoy ambient audio like rain or waves on a beach when you go to sleep, this feature is ideal for having playback pause on its own. For now, Sleep Timer is only available to YouTube Premium users until September 2, but we hope to see this feature roll out to all users in the future.