YouTube Will Let You Leave Comments Through Your TV Remote

YouTube is making its platform friendlier for Shorts creators and living room viewers. Shorts creators will be able to turn their videos into series. As for living room viewers, they will soon be able to see posts and images from creators while also having the option to leave comments on videos using their remotes. New features for these two segments headlined Wednesday’s Made on YouTube event, the platform’s annual creator-focused presentation in New York City. Living room viewership has become an increasingly massive part of YouTube’s viewing equation. Nielsen’s Gauge report, which analyzes the most-watched streamers and networks on TV every month, has ranked YouTube as the No. 1 streamer for the past three years. Every day, more than 1 billion YouTube hours are watched globally on televisions alone. “For our top creators — the top 100 creators on YouTube — over half of them now have TV as their most watched interface,” Kurt Wilms, senior director of product management at YouTube, told TheWrap. First up is Shorts Series. Right now, it’s easy to stumble upon the eighth or 12th episode of a creator’s shortform show, forcing interested viewers to track down the creators’ profile and search through their content for Episode 1. Creators will soon be able to add whichever episodes they wish to their series and add custom artwork to the show. This way, when a viewer discovers a Shorts episode they’re interested in, they just have to click on the Show Feed to see more. YouTube offers a similar offering for its longform creators, making this a seamless addition for the platform. “We’ve seen tremendous growth on TV for our Shorts product. Every month there’s 2 billion hours of Shorts watched just on TV screens,” Wilms said. The feature will be especially useful to a popular and emerging kind of content — microdramas. “Microdramas are very big on YouTube. The amount of microdrama content watched on TV screens for YouTube is up 90% year over year,” he said. This year alone, microdramas have secured 6.5 billion views on YouTube, meaning that, in the first half of the year, viewership for this type of content has increased by 50% overall. YouTube specifically counts content from microdrama studios such as DramaBox and My Drama as microdramas. “We’re seeing the actual microdrama studios make a presence on YouTube and upload their content on YouTube for distribution,” Wilms said. YouTube’s other living room launches have to do with the other side of this platform: viewer engagement. “If you want, you can really lean back, set your remote down and watch your favorite creator’s content. We have a bunch of products that make that really easy,” Wilms said. “But the thing that makes us really unique — YouTube’s bread and butter — is engagement, engaging with the community, engaging with the creator. We’re kind of the only player on the TV screen where we make that really easy, and we encourage it.” Soon, living room viewers will be able to read a creator’s YouTube Posts. Either texts or images, Posts are a way for creators to communicate with their subscribers between videos, for example, when a creator wants to explain why a video has been delayed. The web and mobile-only feature will soon be available on living rooms. Wilms and his team aren’t sure if people will read creator Posts on their TV screens, but they’ve been surprised before. A couple of years ago, the team developed a way for living room viewers to read YouTube comments on their TVs, an offering they weren’t sure would be utilized. It proved to be popular. Now the usage of comments on the TV screen is approaching the usage of comments on the web. “It goes back to this point that viewers really want to engage, both with other viewers in the same community and with creators themselves. It doesn’t matter if you’re on the small screen or the big screen,” he said. “The biggest question is ‘Will viewers use it?’ I think there’s been a lot of indications from how we’ve seen viewers use the big screen that they’re going to love it.” YouTube also unveiled is a living room offering that lets viewers leave comments on videos using their remote control. After seeing how many living room viewers were interested in the comments section, both the YouTube team and creators kept hearing audiences say they wanted to leave comments on their TVs. But the team knew that leaving a written comment via a TV remote would be clunky and labor intensive. That’s when the team looked to the average remote’s microphone. “Even so, when I first heard about it and our team started building it, I was skeptical, like ‘Really? Is this going to work?’” Wilms said. “When you try it, it’s absolutely magical.” Viewers who comment via their remote will have the option to edit their comment. The recordings of these comments will not be used to train Google’s AI models. It’s also a feature that compliments YouTube’s TV companion mode, an offering that lets users leave comments on videos they’re watching on TV using their phones. The feature only works if a user is logged into the same account on both platforms. Made on YouTube unveiled several other updates for creators. The YouTube Shopping affiliate program will expand to 35 countries by the end of the year. A study from the company found that YouTube Shopping tags drove more than twice as many clicks as adding links in the description. YouTube is also expanding its livestreaming options. The “React live” option will let creators react to eligible long form videos or livestreams in real time. They will also have the option to co-stream in early 2027 with Go Live Together, a live creator matchmaking service. Co-hosted livestreams will also be able to compete head-to-head starting in 2027, a matchup where viewers can send chats, gifts and Super Chats to push their creator’s score forward. Finally, YouTube will be offering Live Auto-Dubbing starting in early 2027. More than 40% of live watch time comes from viewers outside a creator’s home country. This option will increase a creator’s global footprint.