Something to look forward to: If you like to watch YouTube on your smart TV, you'll know that it isn't as intuitive as the web version. But the streaming giant is changing that with a new update designed to make the TV app more interactive.
People spend more than 1 billion hours per day watching YouTube on TVs, writes the company, yet there's still a desire to add greater engagement while striking a balance between interactivity and immersion.
The solution YouTube has come up with is a new user interface that reduces the size of the video player while placing features such as comments, description, view count, and likes to the right side of the screen.
Most people prefer to use the YouTube TV app just for watching content, leaving everything else for the web or mobile versions. That's why the full-screen-video view will remain the default option on smart TVs. You'll be able to jump to the new interactive view with a click.
YouTube's Joe Hines and Aishwarya Agarwal revealed that a series of prototypes for the update were developed, ranging in complexity based on the number of steps a user would need to take.
Feedback from users showed that 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.
Something else viewers might notice is a section on the right hand side that displays the products in certain videos. This only happens when creators opt for items in their content to appear in this category. If you want to buy something, you can scan the QR code on the app, allowing you to make a purchase on your phone. As noted by The Verge, it's certainly a more awkward process than being able to buy them directly from your TV.
Something else the new UI will enable is for those watching sports games to keep track of the scores on the right side of the screen.
YouTube will be rolling out the updated TV app to users over the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for its arrival.
https://www.techspot.com/news/102261-youtube-updating-tv-app-better-interaction-comments-likes.html