YouTube announced the release Shorts for TV in a blog post on Monday, November 7. Now, viewers will reportedly be able to enjoy Shorts videos (60 seconds or less) on the big screen at home. Earlier it was available only in the mobile format.

“While expanding Shorts to TV may seem straightforward conceptually, the journey to get here was not as simple as it sounds. That’s why we’re pulling back the curtain to share a behind-the-scenes look at the process of bringing a vertical, mobile-first format to TV,” YouTube added.

To better understand what viewers would like from a Shorts experience on TV, YouTube said that it asked participants to write either 'love' or 'breakup' letters to express their feelings about short-form content on TV.

The love letters showed that viewers liked the community experience, watching content they love easily with friends and family. Meanwhile, the breakup letters showed that people felt Shorts on TV could be clunky, slow to load or lacked key features like sharing.

“In our final phase of design, we created two high-fidelity prototypes of a customised Shorts video player that incorporated feedback from our latest round of research. Now we were trying to balance a pure viewing experience with features that people expect from Shorts and YouTube, like comments, community actions (e.g., like, subscribe) and finding related videos.

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The ‘simple’ prototype included the bare minimum: Sidebars and basic functionality for engaging with Shorts. The ‘maximal’ prototype gave a lot more visible functionality, from related tags to comments, and included a colour-sampled blurred background.

“When we tested these prototypes with the community, we learned that people preferred the ‘maximal’ version. It made better use of the TV screen’s additional space and the colour-sampled background made the experience feel more modern,” the blog post read.

The current rollout design is based on the ‘maximal’ prototype.

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(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)

First Published:Nov 8, 2022 8:31 PM IST