YouTube to require users to rewind videos after watching

San Bruno, CA (dpo) - YouTube is asking its users to be a bit more considerate. The video portal announced that, in future, users who do not rewind videos after watching them will be penalised by being temporarily blocked from the site. These users thus risk not being able to watch any more videos for several days.

“I remember when video tapes were widespread and it was simply a matter of course to rewind them after watching”, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki explains. “In the Internet age, this useful habit has unfortunately died out. Now, we have decided to address this problem.”
The Google affiliate has good reason to bring back rewinding: YouTube currently employs more than 84,000 ‘rewinders’. This team has to work day and night to rewind videos by hand after they have been watched by users.

One of YouTube’s many rewind offices, where employees rewind videos by hand.

With the new rule in place, the rewind team’s work should become easier as they will no longer need to work overtime in order to keep up. This has been a particular problem with viral threads which are watched by millions of people in a matter of seconds.
This is how YouTube plans to teach its users to be more considerate: soon, a notification will appear at the end of each video asking the user to rewind it back to the beginning. To do this, simply move the cursor to the red circle which shows where in the video you are. Click on that circle and drag it back to the start. This enables the next user to watch the video straight away. According to the new rules, once a video is rewound, it should display a time code of 00:00. However, YouTube will also accept 00:01 or 00:02, since these do not have a significant effect on the next user.
Users who fail to rewind their videos three times will be blocked for five days and unable to use YouTube during this time. For repeat offenders, there are even more serious penalties in store. Options include the possibility of a complete ban for a month or automatically playing James Blunt’s song “You're beautiful” every time the user lands on the site.
idea: sfa; dan, ssi; pictures: Shutterstock; first published 2018-07-09
Read the German version HERE.