YouTube makes Shorts vertical videos available for televisions

YouTube makes the short, vertical videos of the Shorts platform available for televisions. Making and watching videos of a minimum of 15 and a maximum of 60 seconds has long been possible on mobile devices and the desktop.

The Shorts experiences are optimized for mobile use, so the videos have a vertical orientation, but such videos on TVs don’t exactly make sense. Therefore suggests YouTube that it researched what users most wanted. For example, a single video on screen with information in the black areas of the screen turned out to be more popular than YouTube’s regular video player design or a variant where three Short videos were placed side by side.

So the chosen design is a single video in view, using the unused parts of the screen next to the video for additional functionality, such as displaying the title and the like and dislike buttons. Perhaps more functionality will be added to this in due course, such as related tags and comments. In the coming weeks, Shorts will be available on 2019 and newer television models and on ‘newer’ game consoles, probably in the form of an app update.