How YouTube Won the Living Room – ryan

YouTube is working on layout changes that allow creators to package their content into shows and seasons. Their product VP calls the effort “a little bit of back to the future.”
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Courtesy of YouTube

Nielsen this week released its latest look at which media giants are dominating TV viewership in the U.S., and once again, one company far outpaced all its rivals: YouTube. For the fourth consecutive month, Google’s video-streaming site accounted for more television usage than any other platform or media conglomerate, capturing a best-yet 12.5 percent of all viewing on big screens. While the 20-year-old YouTube is hardly an overnight success, its evolution from mobile-centric time-killer to a platform that battles Netflix and CBS for primetime eyeballs has been a more recent phenomenon. But it definitely was not an accident.

Starting with the release of its first native TV app more than a decade ago, the streamer has been quietly working to get users comfortable with the idea that scrolling YouTube is something that makes as much sense on a 60-inch 4K TV as it does on a device that fits in your pocket or sits on your desk. It made sure its app worked across virtually every kind of TV operating system and streaming box even as parent company Google started building set-top boxes and TVs that put YouTube front and center. It even spent hundreds of millions of dollars establishing itself as one of the country’s biggest distributors of cable TV, rightly betting such an investment would yield crucial insights into how people watch TV in the 21st century and give it a beachhead on big screens.

A key executive behind YouTube’s push to take over TV has been Christian Oestlien, the vice-president of product who oversees the app ecosystems behind both YouTube and YouTube TV. During a recent interview — part of the reporting for our story earlier this month about how YouTube is now arguably winning the streaming wars — we talked to Oestlien about the origin story of YouTube’s focus on what he likes to call “the living-room experience.” He also explained how YouTube TV became a laboratory for YouTube main, the importance of incorporating “professional” video content from the likes of HBO and Paramount, and why watching YouTube on TV will soon feel a little bit more like scrolling Netflix.

Let’s start from the beginning. How long has YouTube been focused on expanding from a mobile and desktop-driven platform to one worth watching on a big screen, for long stretches of time?
The living-room project — building YouTube on TVs — started work probably 15 years ago. And it’s been a real natural evolution as smart-TV adoption has grown and as they’ve become more sophisticated and more powerful as devices. What we’ve really tried to do is a couple of specific things. Number one, we really lean in with device manufacturers and our partners on the device side — Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon, Android TV, Google TV — to make sure that our product works really well. In the mobile world, you’re building one app for iOS, you’re building one app for Android, and that’s how you think about how you build YouTube.

But there’s so much diversity from a hardware standpoint in the connected TV space that, from the beginning, we wanted to build an app that worked consistently across all those devices. So instead of building one specific app for Apple TVs and another for Rokus, we try and build one app that just works across all those experiences. That requires a lot of work with all of our partners. We give them a sense of our roadmap to make sure that as they evolve their hardware and their television sets, YouTube works consistently there. That’s really important because, from a consumer standpoint, it’s helpful for everyone to know that, “Hey, regardless of the next TV that I buy, it’s going to come with YouTube, and it’s going to work in the same way that it worked on my last television set.”

The next thing we’ve tried to do is lean into use cases that shine in the living room. As our creators have become more sophisticated, a lot of them are starting to develop work that is episodic in nature and has high-quality storytelling that pulls in an audience that follows them over the years. So one of the things we are building is the ability for creators to organize their content from a show perspective, with seasons and episodes. We are really good at learning from how our customers use our service to figure out what the next video is we should recommend to them. But as our creators have built these amazing shows, we want to make sure that when you finish one episode, you have a really elegant experience that goes straight into the next one.

You’ve also added different kinds of content to the YouTube mix in recent years. In addition to NFL Sunday Ticket, users can now subscribe to Max and watch The Gilded Age in the same place they check out MrBeast or Pop the Balloon. You’ve also leaned into video podcasts. That’s about building up viewing on TV sets, too, right?
We think about everything that’s valuable in the living room. And we think by building an app that works well in the TV ecosystem, that works across all these devices, that brings this incredible diversity of content — anchored on our creator community, but brings the best of music, podcasts, traditional media, and sports — we can give consumers something that’s unique that I think highlights where everything is headed.

As you know, YouTube’s share of viewing time on TV sets has expanded dramatically in the last few years. Do you draw a connection between that growth and all the changes you’ve been making?
Yeah, it’s been really helpful. It’s a little bit of back to the future. YouTube started as a different but complementary experience to traditional television, and I think YouTube has evolved into the future of TV in many ways. All of these changes that I talked about have put us in a place where the YouTube app on televisions is the fastest growing part of YouTube today. It’s allowed us, in the U.S. in particular, to establish a leadership position where the last two years we’ve been the number-one streaming app. And in the last couple of months, we’ve been number one in overall media watch time on TV screens.

Separate from main YouTube, you also oversee YouTube TV, which is your subscription product that basically turned YouTube into a cable company, but without the cable. What made you decide to get into the linear-TV business in the first place? Linear has been in decline for so long, and yet here you had a tech company jumping in.  
This is ten years ago now, but when we were starting to think about what YouTube might be able to do for traditional TV, cord-cutting was already beginning to accelerate. And what consumers told us is that they love the content of linear TV. They really love live sports and news; they cared about the shows. But they hated the way it was being delivered, meaning they weren’t interested in signing up for two-year contracts. They didn’t understand why they had to rent hardware and DVR. They didn’t like all the hidden costs. And we thought that we could do a great job bringing that content back to life with a category of user who had drifted away from it by just delivering it in a modern app-based experience.

And have you learned anything from YouTube TV that has helped you build the TV experience for YouTube main?
We’ve learned so much. First, it’s been an amazing testing ground for us to evolve the viewing experience. We spend a lot of time with our customers. They’re kind enough to invite our research teams into their homes, and we will just watch how they engage with traditional content. And one of the things we saw for people that are really passionate about TV and live sports and news is many of them would actually have these setups where they’d have a couple of iPads or tablets open. They’d have their big screen TV on and their mobile device, and they were managing multiple streams across those devices.

I spent a lot of time with my engineers discussing that. And one of the ideas we brainstormed was this concept of multiview. It existed in the past, but it was dependent on whether your hardware was powerful enough. We said, “What if we could deliver a multiview experience where we could watch multiple channels at once, but do it in the same way that we’ve thought about our apps from the beginning, which is to make it universally accessible across devices?”

Multiview is now a real foundational part of how YouTube TV customers use the service. We took that learning and brought it the traditional YouTube app when we brought multiview to Coachella. People can sit back and watch multiple stages at once. So building YouTube TV for us highlighted how much people still love and appreciate traditional programming — they just want to be able to consume it in a modern experience.

YouTube has thrived because it has so many different kinds of content and is really good at connecting users to it via algorithms. I think you started perfecting yours before Netflix streaming was even a thing. But Nielsen research has shown that one of your biggest growth demos is folks 50 and older. Are you looking at ways to serve those viewers who are used to a more traditional TV experience? 
It’s something that we think about a lot. With our Primetime Channels business, which is inclusive of that very comprehensive library of free movies and shows, we’re doing more work to make sure those subscriptions and that part of the service is easy to get to, very discoverable, and that the consumer knows is always there for them if they just want to watch a free movie on a Friday night.

Working on the product of YouTube is about making three things work together: being great at recommendations, making sure that search gets you to the content you care about very quickly, and then also making sure that you as a consumer know there are specific parts of the app that you can go to consistently that will always have the content you might be interested in, whether that’s music, free movies or shows, gaming, or otherwise. The evolution of the app is focused on making sure we can deliver all of that in a seamless way.

So in other words, you want it to feel a little bit more like TV?
That’s right. We want it to feel like it’s YouTube designed for the living room, but it still brings that real community feeling and everything that YouTube on mobile devices is known for — the ability to see and interact with comments, the ability to subscribe to a creator once you discover them or watch them, and even commerce and shopping.

Your CEO, Neal Mohan, has said you’ll be rolling out more changes to the TV app for main YouTube later this year. You’ve mentioned some of them already, like organizing titles by seasons and episodes, but what else is changing and when should we expect it to all roll out? 
You’re going to see that whole shows experience that I talked about come to life later this year. I think you’ll get this real feel for the evolution of television and media when these creator shows and traditional shows are side by side in the app experience. And then similarly, we’re going to evolve the watch experience itself, so when you click on a video and watch it on the big screen, we want to make that a much more elegant UI. We’re making it easier to get to the scrubber if you want to fast-forward, pause, or rewind. We’ve built now the ability for that video player to squeeze back and shrink a little bit and then have a bunch of whole complementary features that you as a consumer can go really deep on. The watch player, the introduction of shows, and this episodic organization and how we do discovery on the platform — those are things that will all evolve over the rest of the year.

What do you mean when you talk about the “evolution of television” for YouTube? Can you elaborate?
We think YouTube can bring the best of all video front and center to consumers. Whether you want Sunday Ticket or Paramount+ or Max — all of those services now are a part of YouTube and an extension of everything else that’s on the platform, whether that’s podcasts, music, creators, or news. YouTube has become that place where you can get all of your favorite media. And we hope it leans into something everybody still gravitates towards, that shared experience of watching something on the big screen.