YouTube Shorts are Coming to your tV - and taking over the Platform
“The UI challenges are certainly non-trivial,” Sherman says, “because it’s almost doing the opposite of bringing landscape video to the phone.” He says there’s lots more to learn about how users want to interact with short-form video on their TV, how those videos should display, even whether the algorithm should change depending on the screen size. Sherman, the product manager behind YouTube’s endless-scrolling short-form TikTok competitor, is quick to quote the numbers: 1.5 billion users a month are watching Shorts, and they’re watching 30 billion videos a month. Shorts, in general, poses a lot of questions for the YouTube app. One version of the Shorts UI YouTube tested was like a side-scrolling queue of Shorts videos, each one playing as the queue moved right to left. That means even simple questions - like, should Shorts loop when they’re playing on a TV? This week, for instance, YouTube is bringing Shorts to its TV apps, so you’ll be able to watch the short-form video from the comfort of your couch. “If you’re watching short-form video,” Sherman says, “and you run across somebody reacting to another video - maybe they green-screen themselves in front of it - we want to make it easy for the user to get to that source.” The team also wants to make it easier to turn a long-form video into a Short and vice versa.
“Or, for that matter,” Sherman continues, “if you find yourself on a long-form watch page, and that video has been remixed a bunch, we want to make it easy to get to all those Shorts.” He keeps riffing: if you’re watching a video soundtracked by Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero,” you should be able to see all the other Shorts using that sound but also the full music video and whatever other Swift videos you want. Another was dead simple: just the video in the middle of the screen. The YouTube team had to reconcile all of that with the larger screen. Then it just has to figure out the best way to get all that video to you, on every screen everywhere. The team eventually landed on showing the video in the center of the screen, with like and dislike buttons next to information about the video’s creator and sound. Just like TikTok is building a music app to help listeners get from viral clip to full album, YouTube sees Shorts as a gateway into YouTube. That hasn’t really worked; the YouTube subreddit is full of people building Chrome extensions and scripts to automatically remove Shorts, and they just don’t seem to belong next to what the company now calls “longform YouTube.” More recently, YouTube moved Shorts to its own tab in the app and its own section of creators’ channel pages. This data has been writt en with GSA Content Gener ator D emov ersion !
With Shorts, there seems to be no beating TikTok at its own algorithmic game, but if YouTube can turn Shorts into both a fun feed of its own and a guide to everything else on the platform, it might have something that’s actually both natively YouTube-y and thoroughly TikTok-y. It’s working on the biggest one you’ve got, but there are many more to come after. This is all brand new, he says, and it’s useful to remember that nobody really knows anything. That much Todd Sherman knows for sure. Sherman seems both excited about and wary of this idea, but mostly he thinks it’s too soon to know for sure much of anything. “I think for videos that are particularly short, within short-form, oftentimes looping is beneficial because you really need more than one watch to get the value out of it.” But with a 60-second video, Sherman says, “you have a beginning, a middle, and an end… “Things have grown since then.” Creators are monetizing; viewers are watching; everything seems to be trending in the right direction. Everybody wins, right? On the other hand, short-form video in the TikTok / Shorts / Reels era is so closely tied to smartphones: the quick tools for editing and remixing a video, the in-app camera, even the vertical orientation and swipe-scrolling feed.
Merging short-form and long-form YouTube is how Shorts wins, but doing it without complicating and wrecking the rest of the app won’t be easy. YouTube’s opportunity in almost every category is the same: to figure out how to build a great gaming / music / kids / podcasts / whatever product and then plug it into the rest of YouTube in uncopyable ways. YouTube Shorts is working. YouTube is already so much more than a simple service for uploading video, and as the company also tries to integrate music, podcasts, games, movies, and much more, making Shorts make sense inside the YouTube app might turn out to be just as hard as competing with TikTok and Instagram Reels. On the one hand, this is a perfectly natural idea: Shorts is a fast-growing content type, and lots of people watch YouTube on their TV. A particularly ambitious version of what Sherman’s talking about could eventually turn Shorts into the new YouTube homepage: a more immersive, more interactive way of browsing through content that then seamlessly leads you around the rest of the platform.
Post a Comment for "YouTube Shorts are Coming to your tV - and taking over the Platform"