Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
Tl;
- YouTube on Android TV adds a new music video option.
- Choosing this allows you to switch between the video, an album art and lyrics.
Millennials at a certain age will recall the good old days when MTV actually played music videos – but don’t listen to them. Waiting for hours for your favorite band to do it on the air as sucking, and being able to pull up the exact music video we want on YouTube is just infinitely much better. Today we learn about a new trick in Youtube’s repertoire to display music videos on your biggest screens.
The YouTube app for Android TV picks up a new button in the playback interface as it is detected by 9to5google. The brand “Display” and adorned with an eye gesture, only this option appears when you look at music video content, which is between similar/dislike and store buttons.
Choosing it with the remote control gets the options above, where you have the choice to continue watching the music video or switching to one of two alternative views. “Artwork” shows the album cover against a colored background, while “Lyrics” takes the same album background and adds – well, you can probably figure it out. Really, our only complaint there is that the texts are made quite big for the kind of screen sizes we are dealing with here, and it can be nice to get an option to fit more, smaller texts on the screen at once.
Although this is very cool, there is still work to be done here, and right now the app is not doing a good job of remembering your preferences. If you change display options for a video and return to it later, YouTube may remember your choice, but in our testing the app is finally standard for the video viewing. The setting does not persist between videos either, so if you watch a lot in a row, you must continue to select screen mode for each. Finally, we notice a clear change in sound quality as we browse the video and artwork/texts -mode, which suggests that the latter comes from YouTube music Sources.
YouTube’s new viewing options should be available on your Android TV device now, as long as you are on version 5.22 of the app or later.
