It’s been clear for a while that YouTube‘s biggest screen in terms of viewing is the TV – but don’t expect the tech giant to just sit back on the couch. On the contrary, it is embracing the idea of adding more and more counter-intuitive features to the living room experience.
At its annual Made on YouTube event Wednesday, the company unveiled nearly three dozen new features for creators, viewers and brands, the latest of what CEO Neal Mohan said were 3,000 new product updates in 2026 to date. Viewers on TVs can now post comments; view “posts” (still images and texts posted to channels by creators); and watch series on YouTube Shorts.
These interactive elements are a key reason why YouTube has topped the Nielsen charts for three years straight with, as of July, 14.2% of all viewing via a TV in the U.S., executives say. (Of course, being available for free doesn’t hurt either.)
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“Consumption is moving away from being passive, and people want to be engaged,” Kurt Wilms, senior director of product management, YouTube on TV, told reporters after the New York event.
Asked to elaborate, he clarified, “I wouldn’t call it passive. I would call it, like, lean back. I’m watching it. Something maybe happens in the show. And then I’m like, ‘Oh, well, I want to read the comments, or I want to leave a comment myself, or, wait, what did she just talk about a different video? I wanna go to her channel and see.’ So now, instantly I become a leaned-in viewer. And so I think it flows, ebbs and flows between two. We don’t think of them as a hard line.”
Though its presence on landscape televisions seems counterintuitive, Shorts has been a runaway hit in the living room, with viewers watching more than 2 billion hours of its programming on TVs each month.
Even inside the company, the reaction to the notion of adapting features from the mobile and web experience is often, “Is this meant for the TV?” Wilms said. “But we’re hearing viewers ask for it and creators ask for it.”
The rollout of expanded capabilities is rooted in a mission to preserve the DNA of the first iteration of the site, which launched in 2005. (The first comment posted on “Me at the Zoo,” the first video ever uploaded, the company breezily noted on Wednesday, was a succinct “Lol.”)
“We didn’t want it to feel broken,” Wilms said of the app when it is viewed on a TV.
Although Shorts seems like a left-field stunner, in retrospect its success made perfect sense. “The first thing everyone was telling me about Shorts on the TV is there was no good way to watch this content with friends or family,” Wilms said. “The TV unlocked communal viewing for Shorts in a way that just wasn’t possible before.”
The strategy of “bringing all these content formats that you might not think would resonate with viewers on the TV” has been a particular focus over the past two years, Wilms said, citing gaming videos, podcasts and shorts. “We saw it again actually around the same time with video comments,” he recalled. Viewers told the company, “‘I want to read the comments on TV,’ and we were thinking, ‘Really?! You want to read the comments on the TV?!’”
While YouTube has not put numbers to it, Wilms estimated that the amount of viewers reading comments on TVs rivals the number doing so on the web. Similar to Shorts and comments, the Posts functionality resulted from consumer and partner research.
“It’s all born out of creator and viewer feedback,” he said. “And we’ve seen time and time again when we bring [features] to the big screen, they’re successful.”
Rather than bucketing viewers according to those who lean back and those who interact, Wilms says the company’s research shows a more blended experience.
“One of the things when we talk to viewers that we hear about a lot is, we call it modes – like, a viewer is in a mode,” Wilms said. “It might be, at night you want to use YouTube on your television as your home stereo and use it for music. Another mode might be you’re with your family and your kids, and you want to use YouTube as a way to watch with them. And so another mode that we’ve heard about is, ‘Oh, I don’t know totally what I want to watch, but I want to sit down and kind of get some quick bites, and so I go into this Shorts mode.”
Enter microdramas, the booming sector that has spawned a host of startup studios along with optimism that the major component of the Asian entertainment ecosystem will gain similar adoption elsewhere.
Microdramas “have been incredibly successful on YouTube,” Wilms said. “There are more than 6.5 billion views of this content on YouTube already this year. On TV screens specifically, microdramas are growing 90% year over year.”
Execs see more upside ahead. “Microdramas in particular, they’re fast paced, they’re action packed, they’re quick, and so in the industry as a whole, I think viewers are resonating to this type of content, so I assume it’s gonna continue to grow,” Wilms added. Overall, we see a lot of success of bite-sized content that could be personalized to your taste. …. People are seeing it as a place to spend breaks in their day.”
