If you’ve been using the YouTube app on your big-screen TV, you may have noticed a few changes in recent days: new audio and animations that appear when you launch the app, and the option to display comments along with what you’re watching.
The audio is official, and YouTube has gone into plenty of detail about it on file blog post (Opens in a new tab). Something “vibrant, engaging and easily recognizable” was required, and so YouTube enlisted the help of audio branding studio Antfood to get the audio snippet just right.
According to YouTube, the three-second clip goes from “rich, brooding tones that signify YouTube’s irresistible appeal” to a major seventh chord that “represents the way YouTube lets you explore the things you really love” — and the sound and animation seem to be They will appear in more YouTube apps over time.
The other change in the YouTube app for TVs is not official but it has been spotted reddit (Opens in a new tab) (Across Android Police (Opens in a new tab)), and gives you the option to view comments. Here at TechRadar, we’ve also seen the feature pop up in YouTube on Android TV.
While viewing videos, you can choose to display comments in a sidebar on the right. It may be useful for videos with a lot of discussion below the line that you want to check out, but you still need to launch the mobile app if you want to reply to comments or add your own.
So far, YouTube has not acknowledged that the comments feature is in testing, but it is clearly visible to some users out there. Whether or not it eventually rolls out to everyone who uses YouTube on TV remains to be seen.
Analysis: Save your eyeballs on YouTube
Most of the changes being made to YouTube and apps like it are aimed at keeping more eyeballs on the app for longer – which, of course, leads to higher engagement and ad revenue. These latest updates may not seem like a big deal, but they can still make a huge difference.
The Netflix startup sound and animation are so recognizable that the annual Netflix content show named after her. YouTube hopes so its introduction section (Opens in a new tab) He becomes familiar to viewers and becomes as popular as his stable motto.
Adding comments will make a bigger difference to your actual viewing experience, as a lot of the main discussions and debates about a video continue here. With some clips, the comments are as interesting as the actual content.
It’s worth emphasizing that feedback can be toggled on and off, at least based on our tests—you don’t have to wade through it all if you don’t want to. We’ll have to wait and see what YouTube officially says about this switch when the time comes.
