Some YouTube users may start seeing YouTube Shorts videos on their TVs as the TikTok-style short videos make it to TVs, the company has announced. YouTube Shorts videos are videos of length of 60 seconds or less and have been around for quite some time. The feature will be available on TV models that were launched in 2019 and later along with newer gaming consoles.
"Coming soon to a TV near you … Shorts! Starting today, viewers will be able to enjoy these bright bursts of video (60 seconds or less) on the big screen at home. 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," Brynn Evans and Melanie Fitzgerald, UX Directors, YouTube, wrote in a blog post.
The Google-owned company believes that the YouTube Shorts experience should be consistent on both TV and smartphones.
"...To make this moment happen, product managers, engineers, designers and researchers from the Shorts and TV teams came together to discuss how to bring this new video format to the big screen. 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," Evans and Fitzgerald added.
It should be noted that YouTube Shorts videos have a vertical format even though TVs are watched in landscape mode.
Playing YouTube Shorts videos on a TV means there will be a lot of blank space on both sides and the company has explained how it addressed that challenge.
"We wanted to know if the unique feel of Shorts could be conveyed in our conventional video player (Option A) or if it should be customized to better fill the blank spaces on either side of the video (Option B). We also considered a divergent option — the 'Jukebox' style (Option C)— where multiple Shorts would fill the screen at the same time, taking full advantage of the TV screen’s additional space," Evans and Fitzgerald explained in the blog post.