YouTube on Wednesday rolled out several new updates aimed at improving the TV user interface.
Key updates include the introduction of QR codes that let you identify and purchase items in tagged videos, an AI upgrade, and improved search.
The updates come as the platform focuses on consolidating its position in the living room. YouTube accounted for 12.4% of total audience time spent on television, surpassing media platforms such as Disney, Paramount and Netflix, according to a Nielsen report in April.
Increasing its shopping offerings, YouTube now supports QR codes on videos where creators can link specific products to their content, allowing viewers to scan the codes with their phones for quick access to product pages.
This feature is aimed at boosting revenue, particularly for shopping-related content, which has seen significant viewership — 35 billion hours in the last year alone, according to the company. In addition, the number of channels earning six figures or more in revenue from TV screens has increased by over 45% in the past year.
While shoppable QR codes aren’t a new concept — Roku, Peacock and others have implemented them — YouTube says its functionality aims to help content creators sell their wares more effectively by linking directly to their online stores.
The platform is also beginning to test the ability to display products at specific, timed moments within videos.
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Other updates focus on improving the overall TV viewing experience. For example, YouTube is expanding its thumbnail file limit from 2MB to 50MB to support 4K resolution thumbnails, and is also experimenting with larger video uploads with select creators to enable higher quality videos.
An AI-powered feature to automatically convert videos uploaded at a lower resolution to Full HD is introduced, and the company plans to add support for upscaling to 4K in the future. YouTube notes that creators will retain control of their content and keep the original files, and viewers can still choose to watch in the original resolution.
This aims to bring the YouTube TV viewing experience in line with competitors, but the effectiveness of the technology remains to be seen. Netflix was accused of using artificial intelligence to enhance older shows such as “A Different World”, but ran into problems that resulted in distorted faces and generally unsatisfactory results.
Other new features include immersive previews to help 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 instead of showing results from across YouTube.
