YouTube rolled out several new updates on Wednesday aimed at improving the TV user interface.
Key updates include the introduction of QR codes to identify and purchase items in tagged videos, AI-powered upscaling, search improvements, and more.
This update comes at a time when the platform is focused on establishing itself in living rooms. According to Nielsen’s April report, YouTube accounted for 12.4% of total viewing time spent watching TV, surpassing media platforms such as Disney, Paramount, and Netflix.
To enhance its shopping offering, YouTube now supports in-video QR codes that allow creators to link specific products to their content, allowing viewers to quickly access product pages by scanning the code with their mobile phone.
The feature is specifically aimed at increasing revenue for shopping-related content, which the company says was watched for 35 billion hours last year alone. Additionally, the number of channels earning six figures or more from TV screens has increased by more than 45% over the past year.
Shoppable QR codes aren’t a new concept – companies like Roku and Peacock have implemented them – but YouTube says the feature is meant to help content creators more effectively sell their products by linking directly to online stores.
The platform has also started testing the ability to showcase products at specific times within videos.
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Other updates focus on improving the overall TV viewing experience. For example, YouTube is increasing the thumbnail file limit from 2 MB to 50 MB to support 4K resolution thumbnails, and is also experimenting with larger video uploads with select creators to enable higher quality videos.
We are introducing an AI-powered feature that automatically converts videos uploaded at lower resolutions to Full HD, and we plan to add support for upscaling to 4K resolution in the future. YouTube says creators can maintain control over their content, preserve their original files, and viewers can still choose to watch in their original resolution.
This is intended to bring YouTube’s TV viewing experience on par with its competitors, but the effectiveness of this technology remains to be seen. Netflix was accused of using AI to upgrade older shows like “A Different World,” but ran into problems with distorted faces and overall unsatisfactory results.
Other new features include immersive previews to help viewers flip through videos, and improved content discovery with contextual search. When a viewer starts 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 across YouTube.
