Soon, you can leave YouTube comments via TV remote, as if that's what's missing in life

The feature was announced during its annual Made On YouTube event, which was itself couched in another announcement: Creators who specialize in vertical, short-form videos, or “Shorts,” will soon be free to pile their content in front of fans watching from their television sets. In a piece on this YouTube development, The Wrap writes that “living room viewership has become an increasingly massive part of YouTube’s viewing equation,” with YouTube ranking as “the No. 1 streamer for the past three years.” Now, Shorts creators will enjoy the same navigable interface as their long-form brethren, with viewers impressed or appalled by their content now able to click a “Show Feed” prompt on their TVs to see more, which will evidently help boost creators of “microdramas,” an ascendant form of content for the platform. “Microdramas are very big on YouTube,” YouTube’s senior director of product management Kurt Wilms told The Wrap. “The amount of microdrama content watched on TV screens for YouTube is up 90% year over year.”

Even with so many couch potatoes glued to YouTube, the platform has, of course, found a way to keep engagement up. Once, TV button-mashing meant running through the dial to find something to gawk at, but don’t think it suddenly means leaving comments on TV YouTube. “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,” Wilms said, with The Wrap noting an apparent interest among users to leave comments for YouTube videos on TV despite TV’s interface limitations (you ever type your login/password info into a Roku app? Madness!). Soon, YouTube will make it “easier” for you to leave a rude comment about Jenny Nicholson not updating her feed nearly as often as she used to, or whatever: Viewers will be able to use their remotes’ microphones to fire off their missives. Wilms: “When I first heard about it and our team started building it, I was skeptical, like, ‘Really? Is this going to work?’ When you try it, it’s absolutely magical.”