
Over the next several weeks, smart television models, gaming consoles, and streaming devices made in 2019 or later will start receiving YouTube Shorts.
The Google-owned video sharing platform announced on November 8 that it is expanding its bite-sized video feature Shorts to television screens everywhere in an effort to fend off growing competition from rivals like Meta and TikTok.
The manufacturer announced that this feature will gradually roll out to smart television models, gaming consoles, and streaming devices made in 2019 or later over the following weeks. These brief movies can be viewed by users from the new Shorts shelf on the YouTube app’s home page or a creator’s channel page.
Additionally, one may engage with them by reading the titles and descriptions of the videos, giving them a like or dislike, and subscribing to the channels of the artists after watching their brief videos.
Neal Mohan, chief product officer of YouTube, wrote in a blog post, “While this may seem like a natural next step, a tremendous amount of effort and care has gone into bringing this vertical, mobile-first experience to the large screen.”
Since Shorts is primarily intended for mobile displays, YouTube executives also described their planning approach and the numerous design experiments they conducted when transferring this video format to the big screen in the blog post. According to the firm, it was crucial that the Shorts experience on TV feel natural on a larger screen and matched with what the community saw on mobile.
A “Jukebox” style player that plays many Shorts simultaneously or a customized player that fills in the empty spaces on each side of the video were among the experiments. The business discovered that the Jukebox style deviated too much from the core of Shorts, which only plays one video at a time, and that the short videos looked bad in the regular player.
When watching short-form video on television, contrary to the traditional lean back viewing experience seen on TV, people preferred to manually advance to the next short video rather than have the feed Autoplay, according to YouTube.
Consequently, the software now enables users to start or stop the movie through the remote by clicking on the brief video directly or by using the play/pause controls. Until the user voluntarily switches to the next video, the video will play continuously on loop. The remote’s up and down buttons can be used to advance to the following video or go back to the previous video.
At a time when the consumption of short films is expanding significantly around the world, this rollout will probably increase the reach of short videos and give YouTube an advantage over its competitors in luring new creators while keeping existing ones on its platform.
YouTube Shorts, which were first released in India in September 2020, asserts that they are currently viewed by over 1.5 billion logged-in users across more than 100 countries each month, producing over 30 billion views every day.
This statement also comes shortly after YouTube declared that beginning in early 2023, it would begin paying Shorts creators a portion of advertising revenue.
If they have 1,000 subscribers and at least 10 million views on their short movies over the course of 90 days, filmmakers who specialize in short films will be eligible to join the program.
“The richness of the Shorts experience will only increase as YouTube continues to make it simpler for viewers to connect on TV. Shorts on TV are a terrific way to connect two of our most significant experiences, which will be beneficial to both creators and viewers “The business stated in the blog entry.
It’s important to note that in some areas, TikTok has also released its own television app on a variety of platforms, including Google TV and Amazon Fire TV. However, the Byte dance-owned app was shut down in India in June 2020.