YouTube on Wednesday showed off several new updates aimed at improving its TV user interface.
Key updates include the introduction of QR codes that let you identify and shop for items in tagged videos, AI-powered upscaling, and improved search.
The updates come as the platform focuses on solidifying its position in the living room. YouTube accounted for 12.4% of the total audience time spent watching television, beating media platforms like Disney, Paramount, and Netflix, per a report by Nielsen in April.
Augmenting its shopping offerings, YouTube is now supporting QR codes in videos where creators can link specific products to their content, enabling viewers to scan the codes with their phones to quickly access product pages.
This feature aims to boost revenue, particularly for shopping-related content, which has seen significant viewership — 35 billion hours in the last year alone, according to the company. Additionally, 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 are not a new concept — Roku, Peacock, and others have implemented them — YouTube says its functionality aims to help content creators sell their merchandise more effectively by linking directly to their online stores.
The platform is also starting to test the ability to showcase products at specific, timed moments within videos.
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Other updates focus on improving the overall TV-watching experience. For instance, YouTube is expanding the thumbnail file limit from 2MB to 50MB to support 4K-resolution thumbnails, and it’s also experimenting with larger video uploads with select creators to enable higher-quality videos.
An AI-powered feature is being introduced to automatically convert videos uploaded at lower resolutions to full HD, and the company plans to add support for upscaling to 4K resolution in the future. YouTube notes that creators will maintain control over their content and preserve original files, and viewers can still choose to watch in the original resolution.
This aims to bring YouTube’s TV viewing experience in line with competitors, but the effectiveness of the technology remains to be seen. Netflix was accused of using AI to upscale older shows, like “A Different World,” but ran into problems that led to distorted faces and generally unsatisfactory results.
Other new features include immersive previews to help viewers flip through videos, and better content discovery with contextual search — when viewers initiate 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.
