The YouTube experience on TVs has always felt like a reflection compared to watching it on phones or the internet. But with TV recently becoming more popular than mobile to watch YouTube in the US, the TV experience is finally getting a redesign soon – and that’s good news as long as some annoying problems are solved in the process.
Almost all my YouTube monitoring takes place on my TV via the Apple TV app. I thought this made me a streaming -Dinosaur, but 2025 -statistics say differently, and that’s why YouTube has promised to prioritize the big screen this year in a way it never has before.
This week, to bond with YouTube’s 20th birthday, we heard that the home for the short-shaped video is getting a “TV viewing up” that will roll out “this summer”.
Exact details of what it means is 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 it includes an improved search experience) plus some “quality adjustments” and a better playback experience. YouTube also promises “Streamlined access to comments, channel info and subscription.”
The last point caught my eye because a relatively recent change of 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.
Instead of listing your subscriptions in alphabetical order, the TV app on most services (Google TV, Four TV and more) are now confusing in the order of mysterious “relevance” – even if it is not in the mobile app. And it frustrates me almost every time I see YouTube on the big screen.
A more TV-like experience
Granted, there are greater complaints about the YouTube experience on TVs -especially an increasingly painful ad experience that makes YouTube -Premium mandatory, unless you enjoy pressing the mute button every few minutes.
But I hope youtube’s promised navigation improvements include bringing back alphabetic subscription lists or a better way to experience them. I have previously used the subscription list as an EPG that quickly helped me find the latest series I enjoyed (my latest occupation was the Recycle Bin 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 doesn’t (yet) read my mind. This is something you can change when you look in a browser (by going to subscriptions> manage> and then select AZ from the drop-down menu), but no longer in the many TV apps.
There are solutions like casting from your phone to your TV instead, but I’m a TV -Born when it comes to YouTube -so I hope the big redesign that is on the way is also restoring some of the functionality that was recently removed on classic Google mode.
There is a danger that these new features will be accompanied by ‘upgrades’ as ‘pause ads’, which is something YouTube has tested while drumming their fingers together like Mr Burns. Another feature promised is another “other screen experience that allows you to use your phone to interact with the video you watch on TV”.
I’m realistic – Google and YouTube rarely give us new features without finding ways to simultaneously print more ad money from the 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 will probably continue to spend more time on YouTube than the best streaming services.
