On Wednesday, YouTube showed off a few new updates designed to improve the user interface on TV. Key updates include the introduction of QR codes that allow you to identify and shop within tagged videos, artificial intelligence-powered video magnification, and improved search.
The updates are being made to the platform to solidify its position on the site. YouTube accounted for 12.4% of all audience time spent watching television, surpassing media platforms such as “Disney”, “Paramount”, and “Netflix”.
Adding to its shopping offerings, YouTube now supports QR codes in videos, where creators can link specific products to their content, and viewers can scan the codes with their phones to quickly access product pages.
The feature is aimed at boosting revenue, especially from shopping-related content, which has seen a surge in viewership — 35 billion hours in the past year alone, the company says. In addition, the number of channels earning six-figure or more in revenue from TV screens has increased by more than 45% in the past year.
Other updates are aimed at improving the overall TV viewing experience. For example, YouTube is increasing the thumbnail file limit from 2MB to 50MB to support 4K resolution thumbnails, and is also experimenting with larger video uploads with select creators to allow for higher quality videos.
Introducing an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered feature that automatically converts videos uploaded in lower resolution to Full HD, and in the future the company plans to add support for conversion to 4K resolution.
This aims to bring YouTube’s TV viewing experience in line with competitors, but the effectiveness of the technology remains to be seen.
Other new updates include immersive viewing, which helps viewers browse videos, and better content discovery with contextual search – when viewers start a search directly from a creator’s channel page, the platform prioritizes videos from that channel at the top of search results, rather than showing results from across YouTube.
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