YouTube Smart TV App Update: What’s New

YouTube celebrated its 20th anniversary last week by launching a number of upgrades for its Music, YouTube TV, and main YouTube platforms.

Google revealed yesterday a number of updates to the YouTube app for smart TVs. These updates mostly concentrate on locating material or receiving various kinds of content, as is the case with the majority of YouTube content.

The rows of videos you view in the app, or shelves, are the largest. Each of the five additional shelves covers a distinct category of information.

Continue searching: This allows you to pick up where you left off by displaying your top three searches.

Play it again: A dedicated music row showcasing your favourite tunes

Beyond the official music or lyric videos, live performances, remixes, and covers showcase alternative renditions of songs you’ve heard or looked for.

Primetime networks: This one displays content from primetime channels that you have most recently looked for or viewed if you have a subscription.

The best videos from your favourite channels that you have viewed.

There are a few additional tabs in addition to the new shelving.

Since Google incorporated the outdated Podcasts app into the YouTube Music feed, YouTube has been promoting podcasts. The YouTube app on your TV now has a specific Podcasts Tab.

There is a Shorts shelf on your subscriptions tab and a new Shorts row in your “Watch Next Feed” for people who watch Shorts on their TV. “For a cleaner layout, we’ve separated shorts from long-form videos,” Team YouTube’s Jessie explains.

To enhance playback and video previewing for a better experience, a few minor adjustments are being made.

First, more and more videos can be looped. Although it was previously limited to playlists, you can now loop “all VOD content.” The “Loop” setting is located in the Playback settings menu.

According to YouTube, “expanded inline previews” are now available on channel sites, subscription pages, and topics pages. Additionally, the platform has finished releasing previews of immersive channels. Channel headers use these full-screen background previews to “make the page more immersive.”

Last but not least, if you’re a creator, Studio Analytics now has a new “Device type” card that helps you see how much of your channel’s viewership comes from computers, tablets, TVs, and mobile devices.

YouTube claims that these upgrades should immediately be available, in contrast to the majority of Google updates that take weeks to go out.