YouTube has been getting a lot of criticism lately with their decisions not being well received by most users, including the trials to increase the number of ads before you can watch a video and locking 4K content behind a paywall. This, however, has not prevented the company from rolling out a visual makeover to YouTube’s Android TV interface.
The update which brings the YouTube app on Android TV and Google TV to version 3.0 makes it easier to get information about the video you are watching while also bringing elements of Material You to the player UI.
As 9to5Google highlights, video titles no longer appear in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. They have instead been moved to a rounded-off box with the video uploader’s name, view count, and publish date, all left-aligned above the playback progress bar.
The video description has also been shifted to this position and can be expanded to appear as an overlay above the video you are watching. Once expanded, it dims the video to make it easier for you to read, however, it has the unintended consequence of you missing large parts of the video that is behind the overlay.
If you use the remote to seek a particular point in the playing video, related video content will still be shown underneath, as in the past. The resultant congestion of this space has now made accessing the like/dislike button, playback speed options and video quality controls take more steps to get to, compared to the previous implementation.
At the end of the day, YouTube has managed to fit more information in a single screen, at the cost of making the application seem a little more cluttered. It might take a while to adjust to the change if you were used to the previous implementation that had a big screen look, but hopefully, the company will streamline a few things including making the like/dislike button more accessible.
9to5google notes they have started seeing the updated UI across different Android TV and Google TV devices, including Nvidia Shield TV and Chromecast. If you have not yet seen the change on your end, it might be just a matter of Google slowly rolling out the update.
