- YouTube TV gets a refreshed video player and expands multiview to non-sports channels.
- YouTube Music introduces Ask Music, while YouTube highlights the 4x playback speed for Premium users.
- YouTube also acknowledges features like voice replies, screen lock, sleep timer, and Song Search.
To toast YouTube’s 20th anniversary, Google has rolled out a major design update for the YouTube TV app. The latest update brings an improved video player interface and expands the multiview feature, which was previously limited to sports and news, to select non-sports channels as well. It will begin rolling out to subscribers in the coming weeks.
The update comes as YouTube celebrates its 20th birthday, and YouTube Music and YouTube Kids both turn 10. A new stat also popped up, showing that, on average, over 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day.
In a blog post about the new update, YouTube shared, “In the next few weeks, YouTube TV members can experiment with building their own multiview with select non-sports content, starting with a small group of popular channels and expanding in the coming months.”
This means users will now be able to create their own custom split-screen grids with up to four streams, now including non-sports content too.
The YouTube TV app is also getting a redesigned video player interface. It moves the channel logo, Subscribe button, and description to the bottom left. Playback controls like play/pause, next, and previous stay in the center, while buttons to like, dislike, comment, save, change view mode, and open settings sit on the far right — all of it placed below the stream bar.
YouTube shared an image showing off the new look. Honestly, it looks much cleaner than the current setup, which bunches all the buttons to the right and keeps the video title and artist on the left. The stream bar still sits below these options in the current layout.
Alongside the YouTube TV updates, the company also announced that creators will soon be able to voice-reply to comments on their videos. This was being tested last year with a small group of creators.
For those who enjoy streaming music, the YouTube Music app is getting a new AI-powered feature called Ask Music. It will let users describe the kind of music they’re in the mood for and then create a personalized radio station based on that.
YouTube Premium members are getting a faster 4x playback option. Earlier, you could only speed up videos to 2x. Although, this change actually started rolling out back in January.
Besides the new faster playback speed, YouTube also talked about some hidden and experimental features. These include long-pressing anywhere on the video player to watch at 2x speed, locking the screen to prevent interruptions, and setting a sleep timer if you like to watch YouTube before bed.
And lastly, the blog post highlights new keyboard shortcuts for YouTube on desktop and the new Song Search feature, where you can simply hum or sing a tune to find the song stuck in your head. This is available on both the YouTube app and the YouTube Music app on Android phones.
A while earlier, YouTube got smarter video recommendations in queue as an experimental feature and reintroduced its long discontinued Premium Lite membership.