The YouTube experience on TVs has always felt like an afterthought compared to watching it on phones or the web. But with TV recently becoming more popular than mobile for watching YouTube in the US, the television experience is finally going to get a redesign soon – and that’s great news, as long as some annoying issues are fixed in the process.
Nearly all of my YouTube watching takes place on my TV via the Apple TV app. I thought this made me a streaming dinosaur, but the 2025 stats say different, and that’s why YouTube has promised to prioritize the big screen this year in a way that it never has before.
This week, to tie in with YouTube’s 20th birthday, we heard that the home of short-form video is getting a “TV viewing upgrade” that will roll out “this summer”.
Precise details of what that means are scarce, but a teaser image (above) gives us an idea of what to expect, along with a few promised improvements.
These include “easier navigation” (let’s hope that includes an improved search experience), plus some “quality tweaks” and a better playback experience. YouTube is also promising “streamlined access to comments, channel info, and subscribing.”
That last point caught my eye, because a relatively recent change to subscriptions in YouTube’s Apple TV app has become a serious pain – and according to Reddit threads, I’m not alone in feeling that way.
Rather than listing your subscriptions in alphabetical order, the TV app on most services (Google TV, Fire TV, and more) now jumbles them up confusingly in order of mysterious “relevance” – even though that isn’t the case in the mobile app. And it frustrates me almost every time I watch YouTube on the big screen.
A more TV-like experience
Granted, there are bigger complaints about the YouTube experience on TVs – most notably, an increasingly painful ad experience that is making YouTube Premium mandatory, unless you enjoy pressing the mute button every few minutes.
But I’m hoping YouTube’s promised navigation improvements include bringing back alphabetical subscription lists, or a better way to experience them. I previously used the subscriptions list like an EPG, which helped me quickly find the latest series I was enjoying (my latest obsession being Trash Theory‘s excellent music essays).
Now, the channels are ordered by what YouTube considers “most relevant”, which is usually different from what I think is relevant – because YouTube can’t (yet) read my mind. This is something you can change when watching in a browser (by going to Subscriptions > Manage > then choosing A-Z from the drop-down menu), but no longer in the many TV apps.
There are workarounds like casting from your phone to your TV instead, but I’m a TV native when it comes to YouTube – so I hope the big redesign that’s en route also restores some of the functionality that was recently removed in classic Google fashion.
There is a danger that these new features will be accompanied by ‘upgrades’ like “pause ads”, which is something YouTube has been testing while drumming its fingers together like Mr Burns. Another feature that has been promised is a “second screen experience that lets you use your phone to interact with the video you’re watching on TV”.
I’m realistic – Google and YouTube rarely give us new features without finding ways to simultaneously print more ad money from the one billion hours we spend watching YouTube content on TVs every day (yes, really). But as long as the TV experience finally feels as polished and user-friendly as the mobile app, I’ll likely continue to spend more time on YouTube than the best streaming services.
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mark.wilson@futurenet.com (Mark Wilson)
