YouTube has brought a good news for YouTube shorts lovers by announcing that its short video feature would be allowed to watch on big screens. Users will be able to watch the 60 seconds videos on their smart TV and bigger screen streaming devices, with the new update. The platform will be releasing the shorts for smart television models, game consoles and streaming devices from 2019 or later in coming weeks. Once updated, the new YouTube short feature will be available on the homepage of the YouTube app or on the channel page.
At first, the short videos were largely consumed from smaller screens of smartphones. But after the launch of TikTok’s smart TV app, the consumption of short videos increased in big screens also. The Google-owned video sharing platform revealed how the team came up with experiments on designs to feature vertical shirt videos on horizontal display of smart TV.
Interestingly, from displaying the YouTube shorts in the conventional video player, to customizing the display to fill the blank spaces on either side of the video, YouTube shares on the designs they experimented to give the best shorts experience on TV. YouTube even considered a Jukebox style where multiple shorts would fill the screen at the same time, taking full advantage of the TV screen’s additional space.
However, the platform decides to render customized shorts experience and selected a clean design while making the most of the wide screen’s additional space. YouTube cites that users can control the videos through the remote by clicking directly on the short video through remote. The platform has also removed the auto play feature for shorts on TV so that the users can manually move to watch the next video.