YouTube just got a big TV app upgrade – here are 9 new time-saving improvements

• YouTube has rolled out some new improvements for smart TVs and consoles
• They include several new sections to help you find videos and music
• This follows news of a bigger redesign due to roll out “this summer”

YouTube is committed to polishing its smart TV experience in a big way this year – and the first signs of its efforts are rolling out now for its app on both TVs and game consoles.

As Google announced in a new YouTube support post, there are nine new UI tweaks that are designed to help you find shows, podcasts, and live music. While they’re not quite as big as the promised redesign of YouTube’s TV experience, they should help save you time and effort when navigating the slightly dated app.

Firstly, there’s a new ‘Continue your search’ section on the home screen, which will apparently display your top three searches. That sounds handy considering the search experience on TVs can be pretty inconsistent and laborious.

Other new home screen sections (which YouTube refers to as ‘shelves’, for some reason) include ‘Listen again’ (showing you the top songs you’ve searched for) and a handy new one called ‘Live performances, remixes and covers’.

As someone who regularly digs into YouTube’s treasure trove of obscure live performances, I can see myself using that quite a bit.

Another new section includes one for ‘Primetime channels’, where you can see the channels you’ve subscribed to, like Paramount+, Showtime, Starz, or DAZN in one place. It seems the lines between YouTube and YouTube TV, its cable replacement service in the US, could soon start to blur further.

The final new ‘shelf’ (or section) might be the most useful, as you can see in the image above, the ‘From your top channels’ section provides some shortcuts to your most-watched YouTube channels. That should mean less time hunting in the slightly annoying subscriptions section.

Outside of those new sections, arguably the biggest arrival is a new Podcasts tab. In February, YouTube noted that it is now the most popular service for listening to podcasts in the US (according to Edison Research), so this feature certainly makes sense.

Another promising upgrade is that YouTube has now split its more mobile-friendly Shorts from its longer-form videos. There’ll now be a ‘Shorts Row’ in your ‘Watch Next’ feed, plus a dedicated Shorts section in your Subscriptions tab.

It isn’t yet clear if this means you’ll now never see Shorts in your subscriptions feed (something I’d be happy with), but either way, it should make the experience feel cleaner.

If you like your videos to play on repeat, it’s also now possible to loop all on-demand videos on YouTube – a feature that was previously only available for playlists. To do that, head into the Playback Settings menu and choose the ‘loop’ setting.

The final UI tweak in this round of updates is that ‘inline previews’ (the little video teasers you see when hovering over a video thumbnail) have now been expanded to pages for channels, subscriptions, and topics.

That feature will likely divide opinion, so it could prove the most controversial of this otherwise positive step forward for YouTube’s TV experience.

This update should roll out soon for the YouTube app on your Smart TV or gaming console, or by the end of this quarter in June. I haven’t received it on my Apple TV box yet, but it will hopefully be available on streaming boxes soon as well.

What else is coming?

Last week, YouTube celebrated its 20th birthday by teasing a redesign of its TV experience, which is apparently coming “this summer” (or by the end of September).

It didn’t expand much on specifics, but released the preview image above and promised “easier navigation” alongside “streamlined access to comments, channel info, and subscribing.”

These upgrades appear to be focused more on the playback experience than the new homescreen improvements, but are certainly welcome too. The big question is whether we’ll also see other ‘upgrades’ like ‘pause ads’ sneakily added to the mix alongside the broader redesign.

We’ll have to wait until later in the year to see, but with a new “second screen experience” that lets you use your smartphone to interact with the videos you’re watching, also coming later this year, it’s clear that YouTube on smart TVs is changing – and mostly for the better.

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Mark is TechRadar’s Senior news editor. Having worked in tech journalism for a ludicrous 17 years, Mark is now attempting to break the world record for the number of camera bags hoarded by one person. He was previously Cameras Editor at both TechRadar and Trusted Reviews, Acting editor on Stuff.tv, as well as Features editor and Reviews editor on Stuff magazine. As a freelancer, he’s contributed to titles including The Sunday Times, FourFourTwo and Arena. And in a former life, he also won The Daily Telegraph’s Young Sportswriter of the Year. But that was before he discovered the strange joys of getting up at 4am for a photo shoot in London’s Square Mile.