Dig deeper into YouTube and you’ll find plenty of useful tricks and tools, but you can get even more from the platform by adding some well-chosen third-party apps—apps that extend YouTube’s functions and features in smart and helpful ways.
One such app is Play, which is available for just about every Apple device out there: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Vision Pro (okay, the Apple Watch misses out). It helps you organize your YouTube viewing and queue, but can also improve search and recommendations.
You’ll need to pay a one-off fee of $2.99 for Play, which means you can install it on as many devices as you like. You can pay another $2.99 per month / $19.99 per year / $99.99 single purchase for even more features.
Basic features in Play
Play will look rather empty when you first load it up. You need to start adding YouTube videos to make it useful, and one way to do that is by clicking the + (plus) button on the toolbar at the top, then pasting in a YouTube URL, and choosing Import. If there’s already a YouTube link on the clipboard, it’ll be pasted in for you.
You can also add YouTube videos to Play as you go about your normal business. Click the share button in Safari (the square and arrow, top right), and you should see an Add to Play button. If it’s not visible on the list, click Edit Extensions and make sure the Play extension is enabled. The app also shows up in share sheets on other Apple devices.
Every time you add a video, you get the option to add one or more tags. This is where you can start benefiting from the organizational tools inside Play. You could use tags like ‘baseball’ or ‘music’ for example, which can then be found again with a click or a tap. On macOS, tags are listed in the sidebar on the left.
You can also set up tags to be applied automatically, based on certain criteria like a video’s title, description, or duration, or the channel it’s come from. From the Organize menu, choose Auto-Tagging, then pick New to set up a new tag rule. You can also set up tags based on criteria that aren’t met, so it’s possible to create some pretty complex conditions for your incoming videos.
On the Organize menu you’ll also find a Smart Search option. This lets you quickly jump to videos matching other rules, besides tags: So you can set up a search for all the videos you’ve rated as five stars, or all the videos added between two specific dates, or all the videos over a certain length. As with tags, these searches are shown on the sidebar.
Tools for filtering and editing the details of multiple videos are available in the toolbar at the top of the screen. If you select any video in your queue, you can see more details about it in the panel on the right—including the video description and when it was uploaded. You can also add ratings to videos and mark them as watched from this panel.
If the video uploader has allowed embedded playback, you can watch videos inside Play by clicking on the red play button on the thumbnail. If not, you can click the arrow in a square to watch the video on YouTube. Play gets even more useful when you’re using it across multiple devices: You can queue up videos on your laptop, for example, then watch them on your Apple TV 4K box. Or you could start watching a series of clips on your iPad, then pick it up later on an iPhone.
Advanced features in Play
If you’re willing to pay extra for Play Premium, then you get access to plenty more features. You’re able to sort your smart searches into folders, for example, merge different tags together, and put your tags into folders. If you want as much control as possible over your video queues, it might be worth upgrading.
Paying for Premium also gives you video transcripts, chapters, and timestamps, when you select videos and they pop up in the right-hand sidebar. Click Show Transcript under a video, and you can jump to specific times in the clip based on the audio accompanying it, or search for something specific. Chapters will show up automatically if the video creator has added them—just click on a chapter to jump to it.
Something else you can do with a Premium subscription is follow channels from inside the Play app—you’ll see a Follow link underneath video thumbnails when you select them from the main queue. Click Channels in the lower left corner, and you can see new videos from all the channels you’re subscribed to, and you can of course add any of these clips to your main queue in Play.
Note too the + (plus) button down in the lower left corner of your Channels inbox: You can add channels from here, but you can also import playlists from YouTube, or from data you’ve downloaded from Google Takeout. It makes it even easier to keep up with new videos from channels you like.
A Play Premium subscription gives you more options for finding new videos too. If you select a video in the queue, and the creator has recommended other videos, you’ll find these in a separate section in the right-hand sidebar. Each video has a small + (plus) button next to it you can use to add the clip to your list in Play.
Choose Play and Settings to customize how Play looks and works on your Mac. You can choose which details are shown alongside videos and in the main video list, and under the Player tab you have the option of connecting a YouTube account—this makes importing videos even easier, and if you’re a YouTube Premium subscriber, it means you won’t see ads either.
It doesn’t take long to learn the ropes of Play, even if you’re a complete beginner, and you may prefer it to the sorting and queueing options available on YouTube itself. Support for Android and Windows would make it even more useful—but if you’re watching videos across multiple Apple devices, it does a fine job of keeping everything in sync.
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