Connected TV (CTV) viewing – or watching on your home TV set – has been the fastest-growing usage category for YouTube, while Shorts has been its fastest-growing content format.
It makes sense, then, for YouTube to combine them both, with YouTube launching a new Shorts experience for your home TV, which will present Shorts in a full-screen, interactive format on your larger viewing device.
As you can see in this example, the new Shorts display will present a smaller viewing window in the middle of the screen, while users will be able to interact with Shorts clips via their TV remote, enabling them to skip through, select topic tags, and more.
YouTube says that it conducted various user tests to establish the best presentation format for Shorts on the larger screen, with the intention of building an experience that maintained the essence of Shorts in a new way.
As per YouTube:
“It was important that the Shorts experience on TV felt consistent with what the community sees on mobile and also natural on the bigger screen.”
The advantage of displaying Shorts content on the bigger screen is that more people can tune in at once, which changes the process, and could help to better engage even more users via YouTube’s TV alternative options.
