YouTube Updates: Playable Multitasking and 3-Minute Shorts!

Transcript

Happy New Year! YouTube has released the first updates of 2025 and we’re here to bring them straight to you. Let’s start with a quick overview: YouTube Playables Multitasking has been rolled out in the US. As a reminder, YouTube Playables allows you to play small smartphone games within the YouTube app, and with Playables Multitasking, you can now also run videos alongside the game. This means we’re not only seeing Subway Surfers in the Shorts feed but also Subway Surfers with a regular video playing on top, and you can still keep playing Subway Surfers. I’m curious to see if this increases average watch time as people are distracted, or how it develops. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! We’ll have to wait and see when this feature comes to Germany.

Next up, a little experiment: The so-called Video Highlights Tool is currently being tested on YouTube Studio for desktop and the YouTube Editor. When you open a video, you normally have the editor where you could previously extract specific segments. This is set to be revamped with the new Video Highlights Tool, allowing for new 16:9 aspect ratio (widescreen) videos to be published, not as Shorts since you have the Remix function on your phone for those. If you’re one of the Creators already granted access, you’ll find a button labeled “Create Video Highlight” in the video editor tool. As soon as we have more info or video material from this test, we’ll make sure to update you here on the channel.

Lastly, a brief update on what we’re calling 3-minute Shorts (I think that’s the best term we can agree on instead of “long Shorts” and such): The 3-minute Shorts have entered their final phase, and the Shorts Creation Tools in the YouTube app now support three-minute Shorts as well. This means Shorts are no longer limited to 60 seconds but can now be up to 180 seconds. I think we can all work with that.

If you have any questions about these topics, feel free to drop them in the comments. We’re also collecting questions for our Q&A livestream, which will likely take place next week as we still need to gather more questions and I’m waiting on feedback from the holiday season.

If you don’t want to miss any YouTube updates, make sure to subscribe to us! See you next week, until then stay safe and keep pushing!