More than ever before, viewer are turning to the largest screen in their homes — their TVs — to watch their favorite YouTube content from dogs, to video games, to sports highlights and more, YouTube posted on their Official Blog.
And while watching television has historically been considered a passive experience, one where you can sit back and enjoy your favorite programs we’re building one that is uniquely YouTube that gives viewers the opportunity to engage with the content they’re watching, even on the big screen. As watch time on TVs has grown to more than 1 billion hours per day, we’re faced with a fun challenge: How can we bring familiar YouTube features and interactivity to the living room while ensuring that the video remains at the center of the experience?
Finding the balance
While we wanted to introduce more interactivity for viewers, we need to ensure that the primary video actions (pause, rewind, fast forward) remained easily accessible and intuitive – after all, content is the core of YouTube.
Finding this balance meant simplifying user interactions to accommodate the remote control, while simultaneously making sure the new design would be applicable to a wide range of use cases.
What we learned from our users was:
The new design works for features that require equal or more attention than the video itself (e.g. comments, description, live chat) but obscuring the video would be detrimental to the viewing experience.
We need to continue to prioritize simplicity over the introduction of additional lightweight controls.
A one size fits all solution may not be the best approach, as features such as live chat and video description benefit from different levels of immersion.
The Verge reported YouTube is constantly tinkering with its app design across different platforms and screen sizes, and shared the latest changes coming to its TV-optimized app. There’s a clear focus on making the viewing experience more interactive and giving greater prominence to chapters, comments, and video descriptions — without getting in the way of the video you’re trying to watch.
The new new shrinks the video down slightly to make space for the description, comments, and other elements around it. It’s not YouTube’s new default look, since many people will still prefer a full-screen layout. But you can easily click into the more interactive interface from the standard video player screen.
By shifting interactive features to the right side, YouTube is also making a renewed effort to bring shopping to the TV screen. You’ll see a “products in this video” section appear whenever creators include what’s being featured in their content. But YouTube hasn’t quite reached the stage of letting you complete an entire transaction from your TV; instead, the app will display a QR code that you can scan to finish buying an item on your phone. Not exactly seamless.
In my opinion, it appears that YouTube might be hoping to become the next Home Shopping Network. Right now, the best YouTube can do is post a QR code for those who want to buy something they saw in a video that they are currently watching.