YouTube Shorts, a short-form video that launched when TikTok gained traction with new digital audiences, is expanding to connected TVs.
The platform’s content is now viewable in the living room, via the YouTube streaming app, the company confirmed in a blog post. In the post, YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan wrote that “an incredible amount of thought and care has gone into bringing this vertical, mobile-first experience to the big screen.” The YouTube app for connected TVs, he noted, has overtaken mobile in the past two years in viewership growth. Nielsen last month said YouTube in September ranked No. 1 among all streaming platforms for the first time, surpassing Netflix and gaining a record share of total viewing via a TV screen in the US
YouTube and its parent company, Alphabet, use a lot of Shorts. The platform has grown to more than 1.5 billion monthly connected users, and creators have cut revenue as it generally is on YouTube. Advances in short-form video this year have coincided with a decline in digital ad spending across the market. YouTube saw ad revenue post its first year-over-year decline in the third quarter (at least since its results began being broken down separately in 2019), mirroring similar results at Meta Platforms, Snap Inc. and other companies. In Alphabet’s third-quarter earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts that the company is exploring “new ways to monetize YouTube Shorts that will support the creator ecosystem.”
YouTube UX (user experience) directors Brynn Evans and Melanie Fitzgerald said in the blog post that sending videos of 60 seconds or less to a much larger screen “wasn’t as simple as it sounds.” Several rounds of testing were required, they said.
In the final stage of development, two versions of the Shorts video player were created and then tested against each other. “We tried to balance a clean viewing experience with features people expect from Shorts and YouTube, such as comments, community actions (eg, like, subscribe) and finding related videos,” Evans and Fitzgerald wrote. In the end, the user-preferred player was “maximum” which “gave much more visible functionality, from related tags to comments, and included a blurred background with color swatches.” Some final improvements were made to the “max” version, resulting in an experience that “balances the fun, quirkiness of the Shorts in a way that’s natural for television,” the blog concluded.
