YouTube is highlighting popular parts of videos with a new 'Most Replayed' feature

YouTube TV on iPhone (Image credit: Bryan M. Wolfe/iMore)

What you need to know

YouTube has added a new 'Most Replayed' feature.
The most replayed sections of videos will be highlighted by a graph overlayed on the video's timeline.
The feature was previously available in beta but is now rolling out to everyone.

YouTube is making it easier for people to see which parts of a video are most popular by highlighting the sections that were "most replayed" by other users. Those sections will appear as a spike on a graph that will be overlayed on the video's timeline.

"If the graph is high, then that part of the video has been replayed often. You can use the graph to quickly find and watch those moments," Google says. Scrubbing through a timeline to find the sections where the graph peaks should theoretically show you which parts were most popular because they were the most replayed. But it's also possible they could be the most confusing or difficult to understand — a presenter mumbling a word could, theoretically, create become the most replayed section of a video, for example.

Youtube Most Replayed Screenshot (Image credit: Google)

As The Verge points out, it will be interesting to see how this kind of information is used by creators and not just the people who watch the videos they make. The new feature could help inform future videos by showing creators which sections were replayed the most, giving them another indicator as to what works and what doesn't.

YouTube has long been the best iPhone video-watching experience in terms of the sheer amount of content on offer and this new feature will be available on mobile as well as the desktop. It's actually a feature that has been available in beta form for a while, but it's rolling out to everyone today and you can probably see it in at least some videos right now.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.