You're settling in for a relaxing evening on the couch, and let's say you grab your Android TV remote and pull up YouTube — a perfectly acceptable entertainment option in 2021. But as you linger too long between suggestions of TikTok compilations, clearing drains with pressure washers, and five-year-old Conan clips, one of those TikTokers starts screaming at you. What the heck is going on? You could be part of YouTube's latest test, as it introduces autoplaying video previews for Android TV.

With this new “feature” active, the video you're highlighting on the YouTube Android TV home screen or in your subscription view will begin playing (as spotted by 9to5Google) after you've paused on it for about 3 seconds. Especially if you've got your volume turned up and aren't expecting this, it can easily prove startling. Videos will continue playing for a short while before slowly turning down their volume and stopping — why there's not a similarly gradual ramp-up at the start, we can't say.

If you're not the biggest fan of this behavior (and maybe that's putting your feelings a little lightly) the good news is you can easily disable it. Just navigate down to YouTube settings and you'll find a nice big “Previews with sound” toggle. Flipping it off doesn't just mute the audio, but also restores previews to their earlier slideshow-like format (which start immediately, not after a 3-second delay).

Maybe there really are people out there who fear silence and welcome the existence of a noisy YouTube homepage full of previews into their lives. The rest of us will be keeping an eye on whether or not this test ends up spreading to more users, and remain hopeful Google doesn't backtrack on the ability to turn it off.