- YouTube has implemented some new improvements for televisions and smart consoles
- They include several new sections to help you find videos and music.
- This follows the news of a larger redesign due to the implementation “this summer”
YouTube undertakes to polish its big intelligent television experience this year, and the first signs of its efforts are now being implemented for application on televisions and game consoles.
As Google announced in a new YouTube support post, there are nine new UI settings that are designed to help you find programs, podcasts and live music. While they are not as great as the promised redesign of the YouTube TV experience, they should help you save time and effort by navigating the slightly outdated application.
First, there is a new section ‘Continue your search’ on the home screen, which will apparently show its three main searches. That sounds useful considering that the search experience on televisions can be quite inconsistent and laborious.
Other new home screen sections (to which YouTube refers as ‘shelves’, for some reason) include ‘Listen Again’ (shown by the main songs it has sought) and a new and practice called ‘live interpretations, remixes and covers’.
As someone who regularly falls into the treasure of YouTube live performances, I can see myself using that enough.
Another new section includes one for ‘schedule channels’, where you can see the channels to which it has been subscribed, such as Paramount+, Showtime, Starz or Dazn in one place. It seems that the lines between YouTube and YouTube TV, their cable replacement service in the US, could soon begin to blur more.
The new ‘shelf’ (or section) can be the most useful, as you can see in the image above, the section ‘from its upper channels’ provides some shortcuts to its most seen YouTube channels. That should mean less hunting time in the slightly annoying subscription section.
Outside these new sections, it could be said that the greatest arrival is a new podcast tab. In February, YouTube said that it is now the most popular service to listen to podcasts in the United States (according to Edison Research), so this feature certainly makes sense.
Another promising update is that YouTube has now divided its most friendly shorts with its videos longer. Now there will be a ‘row of shorts’ in its ‘clock to the next’ feed, in addition to a section of shorts dedicated in its subscription tab.
It is not yet clear if this means that now you will never see shorts in your subscriptions to feed (something that would be happy), but in any way, it should make the experience feel cleaner.
If you like that your videos are repeated in repetition, now it is also possible to make all the videos on request on YouTube, a feature that was previously only available for reproduction lists. To do that, go to the reproduction settings menu and choose the ‘LOOP’ configuration.
The final adjustment of the user interface in this update round is that ‘previous online views’ (the small videos you see when the hoarse pass in a video miniature) have now been extended to pages for channels, subscriptions and themes.
That feature will probably divide the opinion, so it could be the most controversial of this positive step towards the YouTube TV experience.
This update must be implemented soon for the YouTube application on its television console or smart games, or by the end of this June quarter. I have not yet received it in my Apple TV box, but hopefully will be available in the transmission boxes soon as well.
What else does it come from?
Last week, YouTube celebrated its twenty -birthday by making fun of a redesign of its television experience, which apparently comes “this summer” (or by the end of September).
It did not expand much in the details, but launched the image of previous view from above and promised “navigation easier” together with “simplified access to comments, channel information and subscription.”
These updates seem to focus more on the reproduction experience than the new improvements on the home screen, but they are certainly also welcome. The big question is if we will also see other ‘updates’ such as’ pauses’ ads’ added to the mixture along with the wider redesign.
We will have to wait until later in the year to see, but with a new “second screen experience” that allows you to use your smartphone to interact with the videos you are watching, which will also arrive later this year, it is clear that youtube on smart TVs is changing, and mainly for better.
