YouTube Premium subscribers get a sleep timer

Ever find yourself falling asleep to a YouTube video only to wake up hours later with your history filled with auto-playing next video after auto-playing next video? Well, in that case you probably need a sleep timer, and luckily YouTube is now offering just that.

But it’s limited to YouTube Premium subscribers. And it’s an experimental test feature. And, perhaps most annoyingly, the test is only running until September 2. After that, the feature might make it into YouTube per se, shedding its experimental training wheels, or it could disappear forever, there’s absolutely no telling at this point.

If you subscribe to Premium and want to test the sleep timer out, head on over to this page and enable it. Once you do that, when you open YouTube on your phone or desktop you can navigate to the settings menu while playing a video to set the sleep timer to your desired interval after which playback should stop. It’s as easy as that. Now let’s hope this won’t just be a one-off experiment and will live on.