Viewers will now be able to watch short videos (60 seconds or less) on smart television models, game consoles, and streaming devices made in 2019 or later. You can play these short videos from the new Shorts shelf on the homepage of the YouTube app or on a creator’s channel page.
The viewers will also be able to leave likes or dislikes on the videos, go through titles and descriptions, and subscribe to the creator’s channels as usual. “While this may seem like a natural next step, an incredible amount of thought and care has gone into bringing this vertical, mobile-first experience to the big screen,” said YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan in a blog post.
As Shorts is mainly designed for mobile screens the YouTube management and design team are leaving no stone unturned to make it optimized for small screens and gift viewers with a fantastic viewing experience. According to reports, several experiments were done on the Jukebox player as well as the customized player to optimize Shorts for the small-screen audience. The Jukebox style player offered the viewer to have multiple Shorts at the same time. The customized player filled up the blank spaces on either side of the video.
However, the design team discovered that the Jukebox style was not compatible with Shorts that feature one video at a time while the short videos did not look good in the conventional player.
Authorities at the video streaming app stated that small-screen audiences want to manually move on to the next short video rather than rely on autoplay. So the app now allows users to start or stop the video by clicking on the video or using the pause and play buttons. The video will continue to play on a loop until the user manually moves to the next video. The up and down buttons of the remote can also be used to move to the next video or return to the previous video. This will give the viewers a greater sense of control over what they want to watch and what they want to avoid.
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