YouTube Is 20 and Celebrates With New Features for Premium Users

YouTube has been around for a very long time, establishing itself as the de facto video streaming platform for decades. Sure, other platforms like Vimeo and Dailymotion exist, but they’ve never been able to shake Google’s YouTube off its throne. It’s nice to see the platform a lot of us grew up loving make it this far.

As YouTube turns 20, it has decided to celebrate with a set of new features for YouTube, though they particularly focus on users with YouTube Premium or YouTube TV (serving as even more reasons to finally make that jump over to the company’s subscription model). Let’s dive into these new features and even drop some YouTube fun facts.

YouTube Celebrates Its Birthday With New Features for Users

YouTube has turned 20, and along with that milestone age, it has also managed to acquire over 20 billion videos over that time. That’s very impressive and considering I’m a big YouTube guy, I’m proud of the platform’s journey.

Perhaps not specifically to celebrate turning 20, YouTube has timed the announcement of some new features with its birthday, so let’s dive into them to talk about all of the new things coming to the platform.

• YouTube is pushing out a new voice reply feature that creators can use in their videos’ comments. At the moment, the rollout is tiny, but it will expand through 2025.
• YouTube Premium users on mobile will now be able to accelerate video playback beyond just 2x speed. You’ll now be able to go as high as 4x, which is something I’ve wanted for quite some time.
• You can now set a sleep timer to have a YouTube video stop playing once you’re off to dreamland.
• Long-pressing anywhere on the video player is now a handy shortcut to push a video to 2x speed.

YouTube TV Sees a Few Upgrades of Its Own

If you’re a YouTube TV member, you’re going to like that it is bringing some new features as well. For one, the interface is going to change to allow for easier navigation and playback, as well as making it easier to subscribe, check out the comments, and view info about that channel.

YouTube TV will also get the ability for multiview outside of sports content, though channels eligible for this will be limited. That means you’ll be able to watch ESPN and Food Network at the same time, on the same screen.

Here Are Some Fun Facts About Everyone’s Favorite Video Platform

In 20 years, YouTube has seen quite a lot, and there’s a lot of interesting data to take a look at. 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day, and 100 million comments are posted in that same time frame! And of course, I have to mention that the very first YouTube video was a 19-second clip of one of its creators at the zoo.

You might remember that Gangnam Style was the first YouTube video to cross one billion views, but now, there are over 300 of them. Some got there faster than others, though, and the table below shows the champs in that category.