“Play” App for Video Playlists

You don’t need a special app for YouTube playlists. On any given video, there is a decently easy-to-find “Save” option that allows you to add to a playlist. You can have multiple playlists, and they are also decently easy to find and edit.

So it’s an uphill battle for an app like Play ($2.99 on Apple’s App Store), which is exclusively an app for building YouTube playlists. An app you gotta buy that does something the free app already does for free? Tough.

I love me some YouTube, but for some reason, I just can’t get into their playlists feature, even though I do want to remember videos for later. I figured I’d give Play a shot. I’m a few weeks into it, and so far, so good, which is surprising to me as a Grand Abaondoner of Little Used Software.

I think what helps is that it gives you an “Add to Play” link in the native sharing menu, and I have a ton of muscle memory for that native sharing menu.

Anyway, it’s pretty easy to fill it up with videos, and then it becomes this portal app that you know is filled with stuff you want to watch, so it’s easy to click on and be satisfied.

Play isn’t just YouTube, though. Its usefulness is more apparent when you consider it your “videos to watch from anywhere” home.

Supported services: YouTube, Vimeo, Apple Music, Twitter, Rumble, Nebula, Odysee, Apple TV, Netflix, Disney+, Letterboxd, BBC, LinkedIn Learning, Khan Academy, TED, Apple Developer, and O’Reilly Learning.

There are native apps for both iOS and Mac, so that’s got me covered.

You can tag stuff, rate stuff, search, it knows if you’ve watched it or not, etc. All the basics you’d expect from a video CMS, essentially. And it seems to do a good job of extracting metadata from whatever URL you throw at it.

AND it has an iPad version AND it has an Apple TV version. Since I’m so all-in on Apple whatnot, that’s awfully helpful to me.

Adding videos on the Mac app isn’t as smooth as I’d like it to be (it talks about “drag and drop” videos, but I have no idea what that actually means) and the Manage Videos popout is weirdly duplicative, but all in all it’s nicely done.