Abstract
- YouTube is tweaking its TV streaming app to reduce distractions and prioritize simplicity based on user feedback.
- The revised user interface has a dedicated details area, keeping video front and center to minimize distractions.
- YouTube’s changes may be aimed at encouraging more users to subscribe to Premium, offering benefits such as ad-free viewing and offline downloads.
While YouTube may be at the top of the food chain in terms of video streaming platforms, the Google-owned service still faces its fair share of competition. Many video-based applications and services are finding ways to differentiate themselves through the user interface. Now YouTube is shifting its focus to improving its user interface, seemingly with the goal of keeping viewers glued to their big screens.
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YouTube has announced that it is tweaking its app on TV streaming devices like Roku and Chromecast to reduce distractions while watching videos. It’s making the changes based on user feedback, which suggests it could benefit from prioritizing “simplicity” over more control.
In the revised app, you’ll notice that the video you’re watching is still front and center, and the playback controls you’re used to haven’t changed. However, when you click the up arrow on a video title and title, you’ll see a new UI that makes the details much easier to digest — the video will now shrink to better fit the comments, description, and other details in a special area . In the outgoing UI, that same information was visible in an overlay that obscured the right side of the video, and YouTube said its goal here was to keep people engaged with the content they’re broadcasting and minimize distractions.
YouTube wants to keep users interested as it wants to add Premium subscribers
It remains to be seen if viewers will appreciate these changes to the streaming app. However, it’s possible that YouTube is making such changes in hopes of encouraging more existing users to subscribe to its premium service. Recently, Google geographically expanded the availability of YouTube Premium — its paid subscription service — to countries including Uganda, Morocco and Jamaica. One of the biggest benefits of YouTube Premium is that members can avoid intrusive ads while watching videos. Other benefits include the option to download content for offline viewing and background playback support.
If these are not enough reasons for you to start paying for a video streaming service, maybe the package will attract you. In 2023, Google began looking at ways to combine its various products and services to create a single subscription — for example, Google One and Nest Aware were selected to be paired in a bundle. We’ve since seen this rolled out for UK users, with access to Fitbit Premium thrown in as the cherry on top, but such bundles have yet to reach US customers.