Shhhh… Listen! Do You Hear The Sound Of youtube start up?
YouTube for TV gets a fresh start – and can add comments.
If you use the YouTube app on your big-screen television set, you may have noticed a few changes recently: a new sound and animation that appears when the app starts, and what you’re watching. Option to display comments with it. .
The sound is official, and YouTube explained it in great detail in a blog post (opens in new tab). Something “dynamic, catchy and easily recognizable” was needed, and so YouTube enlisted the help of sonic branding studio Antfood to get the audio snippets just right.
According to YouTube, the three-second clip goes from “rich, pitch-bending tones that showcase YouTube’s unwavering gravitational pull” to a major 7th chord that “YouTube lets you discover these things.” “allows you to do what you really love” — and sound and animation will apparently appear in more YouTube apps over time.
Reply in the comments
Another change to the YouTube app for TV isn’t official but has been spotted on Reddit (opens in new tab) (via Android Police (opens in new tab)), and gives you the option to view comments. . Here at TechRadar we’ve also seen this feature pop up in YouTube on an Android TV.
While watching videos, you get the option to display comments in the right sidebar. This can be useful for videos that have a lot of discussion down the line that you want to check out, but you’ll still need to use the mobile app if you want to reply to comments or add your own. Need to finish.
So far, YouTube hasn’t acknowledged that the comment feature is in testing, but it’s clearly visible to some users out there. Whether or not this eventually rolls out to everyone using YouTube on TV remains to be seen.
Analysis: Keep an eye on YouTube
Most of the conversions on YouTube and similar apps are about staying on the app longer – which of course increases engagement and ad revenue. These latest updates may not seem very significant, but they can still make quite a difference.
The Netflix startup sound and animation is so popular that the annual Netflix content showcase is named after it. YouTube will hope that its own intro clip (opens in new tab) will become as familiar to viewers, and as iconic, as its static logo.
Adding comments will make more of a difference in the actual viewing experience, as there is a lot of important discussion and debate around the video. With some clips, the comments are just as interesting as the original content.
It’s worth emphasizing that comments can be turned on and off, at least based on our testing – you don’t have to go through all of them if you don’t want to. We’ll have to wait and see what YouTube has to say about the switch when the time comes.