YouTube testing viewer-created Shorts featuring comments

 San Francisco, July 24 (IANS) Google-owned YouTube has announced that it is testing a feature that enables mobile viewers to create Shorts featuring comments posted on videos they’re watching.

"While creators are already able to reply to comments (posted on their own content) with a Short, we want to explore offering viewers the opportunity to create content from comments as well," the company said in a support page. The Short will appear in the Shorts feed and on the viewers' channel page.

"Viewer-created Shorts won't send notifications to the creator whose video the comment is on, nor the comment author," it added. Moreover, the creators can’t prohibit their comments from being featured in a Short, unless comments on their videos are disabled. This experiment is currently available to a small percentage of viewers on Android and iOS mobile devices across the globe.

Earlier, the video-sharing platform had announced that it was testing a new feature that allows users to long press anywhere on the player while watching a video to automatically bump the playback speed to 2x.

The company was also testing a feature that provides bigger previews to users while seeking. This feature will be helpful as it will make it easier for users to find the exact moment in the video that they want to watch. Moreover, the platform was testing a lock screen feature, which allows users to disable touch input while watching a video. It will help prevent accidental taps causing pause, skip or disruption of the video.

Last month, the video-sharing platform had said that it was testing a three-strikes policy for people using ad blockers. The company also provided details on how the policy works, while noting that "ad blockers violate YouTube's Terms of Service".