YouTube is making its TV app look a lot more like all those other streamers

YouTube won the streaming war in August. According to Nielsen data, YouTube accounted for 10.6% of all streaming activity on connected TV devices last month, with Netflix and Prime Video trailing with 7.9% and 3.1% respectively. (Everyone else clocked in at less than 3%.) To celebrate their victory, the creator-friendly platform is… changing up their TV app to look a lot more like all the other platforms they just beat. It sounds like their marketing team maybe could have benefited from watching a few more YouTube videos on standing out from the crowd.

The company announced its plans for the TV app at a Made on YouTube event in New York on Wednesday, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The updated interface will better organize content into season and episode distinctions like you’d see on any other platform, which means Hot Ones might actually have to stick to its season finales going forward. (If they don’t completely move to Netflix, that is.) In the coming months, the app will also start rolling out “immersive previews” like the ones you see when you linger on a Netflix show page for too long.

“A ton of our creators are really leaning into [a more traditional television format],” Christian Oestlien, YouTube’s VP of product management, told THR. “They’re doing 20 to 40 minute videos, there’s kind of a season arc to it, there’s multiple episodes in it, so we’re giving them the tooling to really create what we’re calling Creator Show Pages so that if you’re a fan of Michelle Khare (for example), you can go to her channel page and actually just kind of go on that sort of binge episodic experience that I think the lean back TV environment really lends itself to.”

According to the company, these are more than just aesthetic tweaks. The number of creators that make the majority of their revenue from TV is up 30% year over year, they say, with the number of top creators receiving the majority of their watchtime on TV increasing more than 400% over the past three years. 

Elsewhere in YouTube land, according to Variety, the company is looking to replace comments with “communities,” which they call “a hub for deeper fan engagement,” introducing something called “hype points” to help boost popular videos, and of course, integrating generative AI to help creators “unlock new forms of expression.” To which this writer asks: could artificial intelligence have dreamed up “Shoes” or “Charlie The Unicorn?” Pretty sure we all know the answer to that.