YouTube Shorts can soon be viewed on your TV screen

YouTube is bringing Shorts– the 60-second videos on its platform– to the big screen experience on television sets. Neal Mohan, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer, wrote in a blog post that the company will now let viewers access Shorts on the TV screen- which is the platform’s fastest-growing surface. Here’s a quick look at how YouTube designed this and which TVs will support this.
YouTube Shorts on TV: When does it roll out, which TVs will support this?
YouTube says the experience will be rolling out on TV models (2019 and later) in the coming weeks. It is safe to assume that most of the prominent smart TV brands will be covered with this update. YouTube is also bringing this to newer game consoles in the coming weeks. If you have a smart TV you will likely have to update the YouTube app in order to see Shorts soon.
YouTube Shorts on TV: What will it look like?
YouTube notes that the design rolling out is a modified version of a prototype that was tested after several rounds of testing. The design will show all the elements that users would expect from Shorts and YouTube. This includes comments, like and subscribe buttons and finding related videos. It plans to bring additional functionality in future releases.

YouTube’s research showed that users preferred what it calls the more ‘maximal’ prototype which had more visible functionality. The prototype included “related tags to comments and included a colour-sampled blurred background,” notes the blog.
The blog post goes on to explain how YouTube’s user experience design leads ensured that short videos can be viewed on TVs. While Shorts is more naturally suited to the mobile platform given the vertical videos and the fact that users have the ability to instantly scroll down to the next video, adapting the same to a TV screen was tougher. According to YouTube, they had to make sure that the Shorts viewing experience on TV felt consent with what users see on mobile.
YouTube first created three prototype options and asked for feedback from select participants.One Option would be to show Shorts in the traditional YouTube video player. The second option would show it customised to better fill the blank spaces on either side of the video. The third option– dubbed the “Jukebox” style– showed multiple Shorts filling the screen at the same time. The second option was what appealed to more users.
YouTube learnt that “viewers wanted to be in the driver’s seat of the viewing experience and were happy to use the remote to manually advance to the next Short rather than have the feed autoplay.” “Typically we find that level of interactivity can be tedious with a remote, but in this case, short-form video is unique. Research indicated that people want to take charge of the viewing experience — just like with Shorts on mobile — and even expected it,” the post adds.
After this initial research, YouTube created two prototypes of a customised Shorts video player, based on feedback from the latest research. Eventually, research participants preferred the prototype which had more visible functionality and this is the one rolling out to all users.