YouTube TV’s shorter-attention-span viewers may applaud (albeit briefly) two new features apparently coming to the streaming video service: YouTube’s TikTok-esque Shorts clips and the option to view four channels at once.
Protocol’s Janko Roettgers reported these changes Monday, citing a presentation from YouTube employees at “an internal partner event with hardware manufacturers last month.” He wrote that this update will ship “in the coming months” to the Google service’s apps.
YouTube debuted Shorts in India in September of 2020 as its answer to TikTok’s short-form clips (following the example of Instagram’s Reels, launched in August of 2020) before bringing that feature to the U.S. in March of 2021. On Alphabet’s Q2 earnings call in late July, CEO Sundar Pichai said Shorts was now racking up more than 30 billion daily views.
Google, Facebook and Snapchat have been so thirsty to clone TikTok because that short-form-video app has done so well at drawing its users’ attention. In June, MoffettNathanson cited AppAnnie statistics that TikTok users spent an average of 307 hours a year in the app in 2021, versus 193 for Facebook and 92 for Instagram, declaring “TikTok is big and a force to be reckoned with.”
But TikTok has yet to secure much of a beachhead on larger screens. It only announced its first integration on a connected-TV platform in June, when Vizio began shipping a TikTok app for its Smartcast TV models.
Protocol’s Roettgers also wrote that this upcoming revision to YouTube TV, which had forecast interface changes in February, will also add a Mosaic Mode that allows viewers to watch four channels simultaneously in a grid interface. It evokes a similar feature that Sony’s PlayStation Vue added in 2019, months before that linear streaming TV service shut down.
Google announced in July that the service had passed 5 million users — but that figure includes viewers on free trials as well as subscribers paying $65 or more a month.