The YouTube experience on televisions has always felt a reflection afterwards compared to looking at it on phones or on the web. But television becoming recently more popular than mobile for watching YouTube in the United States, the television experience will finally get a recast soon – and this is excellent news, as long as some boring problems are resolved in the process.
Almost all my monitoring of YouTube takes place on my TV via the Apple TV application. I thought it was a streaming dinosaur, but the 2025 statistics say different, and that is why Youtube promised to prioritize the big screen this year in a way that he never had before.
This week, to link with the 20th anniversary of Youtube, we heard that the House of the Video Court-Circuité obtains an “upgrade of television” which will deploy “this summer”.
Precise details of what it means are rare, but a teaser image (above) gives us an idea of what to expect, as well as some promised improvements.
These include “easier navigation” (hope that this includes an improved research experience), as well as “quality adjustments” and a better reading experience. YouTube also promises “rationalized access to comments, canal information and subscription”.
This last point drew my attention, because a relatively recent change in subscriptions in the Apple TV application of YouTube has become serious pain – and according to Reddit’s sons, I am not the only one to feel in this way.
Rather than listing your subscriptions in alphabetical order, the TV application on most services (Google TV, Fire TV, and more) now stimulates them with confusion in order of mysterious “relevance” – even if this is not the case in the mobile application. And that frustrates me almost every time I look at Youtube on the big screen.
A more television experience
Admittedly, there are more important complaints concerning the YouTube experience on televisions – in particular, an increasingly painful advertising experience which makes the youtube bonus compulsory, unless you like to press the silent button every few minutes.
But I hope that youtube’s promised navigation improvements include bringing him back from alphabetical subscription lists, or a better way to experience them. I previously used the list of subscriptions as an EPG, which quickly helped me find the last series that I appreciated (my last obsession being excellent musical trials of trash theory).
Now, the channels are ordered by what Youtube considers “the most relevant”, which is generally different from what I think is relevant – because YouTube cannot (yet) read in my mind. This is something you can change when you look in a browser (by going to subscriptions> Manage> then choosing AZ from the drop -down menu), but not in the many TV applications.
Rather, there are bypass solutions like the casting of your phone to your television, but I am from television with regard to YouTube – so I hope that the great overhaul which is on the way also restores some of the features that have been recently deleted in classic Google fashion.
There is a danger that these new features be accompanied by “upgrades” such as “pause advertisements”, which YouTube tested while beating his fingers like Mr. Burns. Another promised feature is a “second screen experience that allows you to use your phone to interact with the video you watch on television”.
I am realistic – Google and YouTube rarely give us new features without finding ways to simultaneously print more advertising money from a billion hours than we spend youtube content on televisions every day (yes, really). But as long as the television experience finally feels as polished and friendly as the mobile application, I will probably continue to spend more time on YouTube than the best streaming services.
