Want to hear a wild stat? People consume 1 billion hours per day of YouTube on TVs. Just. On. TVs. That’s crazy, right? Imagining a world where we watch 1 billion hours across all YouTube platforms is nuts by itself, but today, Google says that we’re hitting that number each day, just on your home’s biggest screen.
I bring this up because alongside that stat, YouTube is getting a welcomed design change for TVs. Google shared an entire blog post about the decision and the testing they’ve done around it and how they tried to find a balance between leaning back to watch while still being able to multitask or dive deeper into content. It could be worth a read if design decisions are your thing.
For those who just want the direct-to-the-point story here, you need to know that this design brings more YouTube features (like comments, descriptions, etc.) to your screen in a way that won’t interrupt your viewing experience.
You can see this in the image above, where YouTube for TVs will now have a sidebar with sections for comments, the description, shopping links, views, likes, chapters, and all of that. When viewing this stuff, the YouTube video shrinks slightly to the left to let you interact with these options, that then load in their own panel on the right side. It looks slick.
Previously, to view any of this stuff, you’d have to move you cursor up, click on the title of the video and then an overlay would cover your video in order to show you the info we described above. It wasn’t the worst thing, but it certainly took away from the video you were watching. This change should bring much joy to those of us adding to the billion hours watched each day.
Google says this new viewing experience will rollout over the “next few days” and that they are also going to release it on YouTube TV when exploring Views.
Let us know if you see it!