How to schedule YouTube videos, Premieres and Shorts

The short version

YouTube schedules uploads natively. In YouTube Studio, set the video's visibility to Schedule and it stays private until the time you pick. You can turn a scheduled video into a Premiere with a countdown, though not for Shorts.

Schedule a video in YouTube Studio

1. Upload your video in YouTube Studio on a computer (the YouTube app also supports scheduling).
2. At the Visibility step, choose Schedule.
3. Set the date, time and time zone, then select Schedule.

The video stays private until then. The date on the public watch page follows Pacific time, so if you schedule from a time zone ahead of Pacific, the date viewers see can differ from the one in Studio.

Turn it into a Premiere

Choose Schedule, set the date and time, tick Set as Premiere, then Set up Premiere to pick a countdown theme and length. In the app, choose Set as Premiere on the visibility page. Shorts, 360 and VR180 videos, and output above 1080p can't premiere.

Change or cancel

Open Content in YouTube Studio, select the video and go to Visibility. To pick a new time it must stay Private. Choosing Public publishes it immediately.

What schedulers can do through the API

• Scheduling is built in. A tool can set a publish time (publishAt), but only on a video that is private and has never been published. A time in the past publishes it at once.
• Upload quota. Uploads use a separate quota bucket of 100 calls a day per project, and files can be up to 256 GB.
• Daily upload limit. YouTube applies a daily upload limit per channel across desktop, mobile and the API, but doesn't publish the number.

Check thumbnail, Shorts and banner sizes on the YouTube hub. For titles and descriptions, the character counter checks YouTube's 100 and 5,000 character limits.