Google has been saying that it wants us to watch YouTube for periods up to 4 or 5 hours at a time, like TV, rather than 5 minutes at a time. And last week launched its first attempt to do something about it with the launch of Lean Back. From what we’ve seen, like YouTube it is highly addictive.
As we said this is one initiative which Google has launched to get us watching more YouTube. Lean Back delivers the highest definition version of any given video available, to either your HD TV screen via a PC or the Google TV set top, when it comes out later this year.
The idea is that YouTube takes a stab at your preferences and lines up continuous video snippets to watch. This is very much in line with the MTV experience, but instead of music video after music video, it is video item after video item. The arrow keys and carriage return on your PC keyboard are all that are needed to navigate the stream of videos right now, just click right to move onto the next one, left to go back one, down to look at the next four or five videos about to show. It looks like Google is getting the controls ready for a TV remote.
You can link it to your Facebook account to watch what your friends are watching. You can link to any video you’ve bought on YouTube from any paid professional sources. You can tap into other people’s play lists on YouTube Lean back.
We’re not quite sure (we kept watching instead of playing around with it) how you change your preferences, but it probably learns from the videos you watch all the way through. We’re sure any such system will be easy, perhaps just a few buttons, because that’s its nature ‘ it’s for couch potatoes, so must have minimal interactivity ‘ no searching, no browsing, just watch.
We have openly wondered what content YouTube could bring to Google TV, well this might be just one of key several initiatives, but of course this is not just for Google TV, because it can be tapped into by any YouTube viewer. Our own view is that it’s one step at a time, and this on its own will never close down the broadcast networks, but you never know what ten years will do.
YouTube has also unveiled a new version of its mobile site m.youtube.com, which it says is faster and allows the creation of playlists and favorite videos for the first time. It says that this now gets 100 million mobile video playbacks a day.