“The magic video button has arrived,” and it’s a pause button.
Pause for Later, a free browser extension launched last December, allows you to resume watching YouTube videos where you left off in the event you need to leave suddenly.
The extension is already available for various browsers, including Chrome, iOS, Opera, and Android, and only requires you to register an account.
Pause for Later also stores the videos you watched, a feature that’s much simpler and cleaner than YouTube’s own Viewing History tab. The extension also works for Vimeo and Hulu videos.
PC World called the extension “a lot less cluttered and confusing than YouTube’s own video manager.”
That may be so, but the question remains: Why doesn’t YouTube have this feature already built into its site? After all, Hulu, YouTube’s top competitor, already has a similar feature to Pause for Later.
The YouTube community has been slow to embrace the product. Pause for Play has roughly 100 followers on Twitter and even less views for its tutorial video.
But YouTubers should benefit from the service, as the browser extension makes it far easier to pause, share, and resume videos at a particular time stamp.
It’s almost like magic.
Photo by Helga Weber