YouTube‘s TV dominion has put it in closer competition than ever with traditional television networks and streaming services like Netflix. It’s been winning for sheer weight of watch time, holding top spot as the #1 most-viewed video destination in the U.S., largely for one core reason: no one else can touch the amount of content it has or drive the amount of traffic it does.
But just because no one else can catch it, doesn’t mean YouTube can’t make tweaks to bring it closer in aesthetics to its competitors.
We recently noticed some YouTube channels looking a little different: fresh new UX that looks more like browsing through Netflix than YouTube, episode descriptions and a “Watch Now” button to jump right in, and shelves of scheduled content that would be right at home on DirecTV.
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When you click on a ‘normal’ YouTube channel, it brings you to the channel’s homepage, where the creator can pin one featured video, followed by shelves of playlists. You can see videos’ titles and thumbnails, but no descriptions. To see more of the creator’s recent or popular content, you have to manually navigate over to the Videos tab and pick a sorting method.
This is the YouTube UX we’ve had for years. We know it, we get it, it’s familiar on the eyes. We here at Tubefilter have spent thousands of hours using this UX while cataloging creators’ latest achievements, researching which channels are topping the world’s charts, and seeing who’s scored major brand sponsorships.
But while the default YouTube UX is serviceable, it’s also…samey. That one featured video aside, everything is the same size. Videos don’t stand out–and many creators make uniform thumbnails that are designed to catch viewers’ attention on the homepage or in recommended and let them know Hey! That creator you like has a new video! The default UX can turn that practice from effective to eye-straining, and gives an impression of the creator’s content being samey, too.
This new UX, which YouTube refers to as “early […] experimentation of YouTube’s Shows feature,” flips all that on its head.
Take Law&Crime, for example. The true crime network was founded in 2016 by longtime TV host Dan Abrams, and sold to Jellysmack for a reported $125 million in 2023. It has over 7 million subscribers and generates around ~100 million views per month with half-hour-long, evening news-style episodes about current criminal cases in the U.S.
Some recent videos include ‘Man of God’ and Wife Accused of Locking Boy in Shed for Months, Florida Teen Prays While Admitting to Shooting Parents in Chilling 911 Call, Influencer and Model Arrested After Husband’s Brutal Stabbing Death, and New Twist in ‘Freak’ Teacher’s Alleged Teen Sex Scandal.
If you navigate to those videos, they look like normal YouTube videos. Head over to Law&Crime’s channel, though, and the differences are stark.
Law&Crime’s home tab greets viewers with a nearly edge-to-edge shelf of recent videos. Supersized thumbnails are overlaid with view counts and video length info, and a new button prompts, “Start Watching.” Each video gets a few seconds of spotlight, then cycles on to the next, Netflix homepage style.
Scroll down, and directly beneath that display is a shelf of upcoming content. Law&Crime debuts a new episode every half hour, and viewers can see the next slate of programming up to 12 hours in advance.
Below that are shelves of Law&Crime’s various productions, with descriptions of each show and a playlist of uploads organized by most recent.
This UX, as we mentioned, is part of YouTube’s in-development Shows feature. Channels like Law&Crime are invited to upgrade to the UX, which is then shown to 10% of YouTube users “in select countries,” the platform tells participants in an invite message shared with Tubefilter.
The overall goal of this glow-up is to “elevate the UX and discovery of Shows (i.e. playlists with a clear connection across episodes),” YouTube adds.
Basically, it wants to give creators who make strongly connected content and curate good playlists of that content a way to look more like a TV network producing TV programming. After all, TV is where most people are watching their YouTube content these days (at least, in the U.S.).
Along with the new channel UX, Shows get spotlight in the “Recommended Shows” and “Continue Watching” shelves on the YouTube homepage, “and be eligible for continued watching treatment in Watch Next,” it says.
Shows enrolling now will also get early access to the YouTube Studio launch a Shows toolkit, including features like season organization, “TV optimized Show artwork,” genre tags, and more that’ll become available “later this year.”
This is a new frontier for YouTube, which occasionally makes tweaks to things like channel bios and tabs, but hasn’t moved away from the standard rolodex-of-one-inch-thumbnails in…well…ever. This UX rewards the creators and their teams who have essentially become full-fledged, digital-first creative studios. It lets them promote content with attention-grabbing, clearly organized shelves that are new-viewer friendly. And, we’ll be honest, this UX just plain looks good. It’s a fresh change–and one we’re keen to see more of as YouTube debuts Shows later this year.
