YouTube Shorts are Coming to your tV - and taking over the Platform
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. That means even simple questions - like, should Shorts loop when they’re playing on a TV? 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. 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. 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. 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. Then it just has to figure out the best way to get all that video to you, on every screen everywhere. 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. But plugging Shorts into the rest of YouTube is crucial to making Shorts work. 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. “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. 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. Short-form is still promoted everywhere in the YouTube experience, but now it’s treated like a separate thing. One version of the Shorts UI YouTube tested was like a side-scrolling queue of Shorts videos, youtube shorts each one playing as the queue moved right to left. 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. Shorts, in general, poses a lot of questions for the YouTube app.
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. The question really facing YouTube - now that it’s increasingly clear that the TikTok-style vertical scroll is part of the future of video, and now that Shorts seems likely to be part of that future - is how Shorts actually fits in. ” he asks. Maybe, he wonders aloud, Shorts on TV should bias more toward generally popular videos. “Are the things you enjoy with a very personal experience for you the same things you want to watch on a device that typically has more than one person looking at it? “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… It’s working on the biggest one you’ve got, but there are many more to come after. Or toward videos you’ve already liked. “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. This was generated with GSA Con tent G enerator D emoversion!
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