YouTube officially introduces ‘Video Chapters’ to all creators

The social media platforms timely come at the front with easy and helpful features to help users get facilitated with the application fully.

Video-streaming platform YouTube is said to be a users’ best companion as it has all the streaming videos available a person needs to get entertained through.

However, in your travels around YouTube the past few weeks, you might have seen a video or two that features “chapters.” Chapters allow creators to timestamp and name sections of their videos for easy navigation. The feature has been in experimental mode for the past few weeks, but now YouTube is making chapters official.

YouTube Chapters eases navigate longer videos:

Chapters add a lot of functionality to the YouTube seek bar. The bar is now chopped up into segments instead of being a solid red line.

Mouse or drag over the segments and you’ll get a thumbnail with the title of the chapter for that section of the seek bar.

YouTube creators can add chapters to their videos via the description. Just start a list of timestamps with “0:00” followed by chapter titles, with one timestamp on each line. If you don’t want chapters, just don’t start a timestamp list with “0:00.”

Google says the feature is “available on Desktop, Android, and iOS.” However, it has a slow rollout on some platforms. 

YouTube said the feature gained a lot of positive feedback during testing, but it has tweaked the product a bit based on its earlier experimentation.

The new feature positions YouTube to be a better resource for long-form content as it becomes less cumbersome to navigate videos.

The feature could even increase user engagement with some videos as viewers won’t get frustrated by having to scroll through parts they don’t want to watch.