YouTube is trying a sleep timer for its Premium tier

YouTube always seems to be pushing out new features to its premium tier, and the latest involves a sleep timer that automatically stops videos after a set amount of time. Yeah, nothing exactly mind-blowing but might prove useful if you like to doze off to sleep with a long-playing podcast or some white noise in the background. Toggle this timer from this page on desktop or via Settings > Try new experimental features on mobile if you're a YouTube Premium user.

A sleep timer option is now added inside the video player to the Settings menu.  It'll pop up when YouTube pauses playback and ask if you need to extend the timer. In incorporating this feature, YouTube actually lags the competition a bit. Spotify has had a sleep timer for some time, and TikTok last year began testing bedtime prompts based on your set bedtime.

According to YouTube's experimental features page, the sleep timer feature will be available until September 2, but hopefully the streaming platform will make the feature permanent and then expand it to free users as well. Other previous YouTube experiments include an AI assistant that answers questions relating to videos and a screen lock feature to prevent accidental taps.

As you can imagine, this allows you to stop breeding after the specified period. If you really fall asleep before the timer ends, you will have the opportunity to drop the timer, finish it, and keep observing without an additional timer. You'll be able to set a specific number of hours and minutes for the timer, and the remaining time will be displayed as a notification.

YouTube Music already offers a sleep timer, as do many other streaming and podcast apps, but of course none of them are used as often as YouTube, so this will be a very welcome addition when it finally arrives. The lack of a sleep timer isn't as much of an issue on iOS, where you can set a system-wide timer that ends all playback when it hits zero, but Android doesn't have a similar option.