Saturday, August 23, 2014

YouTube Suggestion: Series Awareness

I know YouTube employees are paid to change things, and I know how bothersome it can be when they needlessly reinvent things like the producer's "backstage", so I have an idea for a feature that I think would be actually welcome.

I like to create (and watch) series of videos in an episodic manner that are intended to be viewed in a certain order. I would like an easy way for people to notice "hey, this video is part of a larger series" and possibly start watching the series from the beginning in order to better understand what's going on. I can sort of do this with playlists, but from my experience those playlists are never presented to the viewer unless they specifically search for it.

When viewers go to their subscriptions page and see a whole bunch of videos (sorted newest to oldest) that they don't have time to watch right now, they might use the Watch Later feature to shove a bunch of videos into a private playlist for later viewing. Of course, if you do that from newest to oldest (the order in which you see the videos when scrolling down the page), the series videos are in the exact opposite order that a logical person would watch them in.

So, I would like YouTube to automatically reorder videos in people's playlists (with their permission, of course) to make sure that they will be watched in such an order that no video in a playlist is watched before another video in the playlist that is before it in its series. For this to work, video creators would have to create series declarations and assign each video to at most one series, but this is basically playlists anyway, with more management. (And yes, I know about the "show" system. It's only accessible to people with lots more subscribers than I.)

Also, it would be really nice if there was a way to "dump" a playlist into another playlist, thereby combining them.

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