YouTube sleep timer could curtail late night rabbit hole trips

One of my favourite things to do on a Friday night, when returning home from the evening’s activities, is to settle in with a beer or two and allow the YouTube algorithm to take the wheel and guide me into the wee hours.

Whether it’s football highlights from my childhood or live performances from some of my favourite bands and artists, the time just seems to pass by in the blink of an eye with the YouTube app open on the TV.

That’s often to the chagrin of my wife who is either trying to sleep in bed while the soundbar blasting, or victim to me waking her up on the couch to “watch this!”

So, news that YouTube is testing a sleep timer on its Premium subscribers with a view to rolling it out to the user base comes with both gratitude and sadness.

Graditude because it’ll probably encourage me to get to bed a little earlier, and sadness because it would curtail the theraputic element of finding a rare Simon & Garfunkel performance from 1968 and listening as I drift in and out of the ether.

The experiemental feature will be available until September 2, YouTube says (via 9to5Google). In a post on the site’s ‘New’ section, the video sharing platform says: “Sleep Timer lets you set a timer to automatically pause playback after a certain amount of time.

“After signing up, open YouTube on your mobile device or on desktop and navigate to the settings menu while playing a video to try Sleep Timer.”

Users will be able to choose from 10, 15, 20, 30, 45, and 60 minutes and the end of the video, however long that may be.

We’d imagine that soon after the test is over, Google will roll this feature out to the entire userbase. Google currently has a digital health feature that invites users to take a break after a certain period of watching, set by the user themselves. However, this one’s more for the night owls out there.