YouTube is set to launch a major overhaul of its connected TV app, according to a report published Monday by the Penske showbiz trades.
The platform will see new functionality and an entirely new look in what seems like an attempt to lock down its position as the top streaming platform.
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“When we launched Primetime Channels in the main app, one of the things we really wanted to make sure we delivered was, if you look for [HBO’s] House of the Dragon and you go to that channel page, you want to look by season and episode and have this really rich, immersive channel page experience which people have come to expect around episodic content,” Christian Oestlien, VP of product management at YouTube, told the Penske Media Group trades.
“Turns out, a ton of our creators are really leaning into that format, too,” Oestlien added. “They’re doing 20- to 40-minute videos, there’s kind of a season arc to it, there’s multiple episodes in it, so we’re giving them the tooling to really create what we’re calling Creator Show Pages so that if you’re a fan of Michelle Khare, you can go to her channel page and actually just kind of go on that sort of binge episodic experience that I think the lean back TV environment really lends itself to,” Oestlien said.
As part of the change, creators can now break up their videos into different seasons and episodes that closely resemble the streaming navigation menus of many other streaming services.
When viewed on the TV, YouTube’s new UI would display full-screen episode descriptions and organize content in hierarchical order.
In addition, YouTube creators will have the ability to create “immersive previews,” which play automatically upon navigating to a user’s page.
YouTube’s AI-generated content will be watermarked and have a label indicating it was made by AI, the company said.
YouTube has yet to reveal how its new formatting will translate to devices outside of standard TV sets, but it’s likely it will roll out to desktop and mobile devices in some form.
Creators can expect access to these features later this year.
