Skip to main content

YouTube Leanback is YouTube for the big screen

YouTube today formally rolled out YouTube Leanback. As the name suggests, Leanback allows you to actually lean back on a living room sofa and watch YouTube on a big TV screen. The 10-foot interface is designed to be used on Google TV or anything big with a long viewing distance. The layout features minimal set of controls, scraps the comments and many of the other visuals while making many common features available through keyboard shortcuts.

youtube-leanback

Leanback, which was previewed at Google I/O back in May, is an expansion of the basic idea in an earlier service called YouTube XL - which is still available, by the way. It runs in any browser that supports Flash and is designed to make watching YouTube feel a bit like watching a personalized TV channel. Videos display in full-screen mode, and you press the Up Arrow key to search and the Down Arrow key to reach playback controls.

Leanback starts playing a video ‘feed’ immediately after the page loads. The feed is based on your YouTube settings and preferences, including content from your subscriptions, videos your friends are sharing on Facebook and your search history. If you don’t like what’s playing, you can use the right arrow key on your keyboard to skip ahead to the next video, or try the up/down arrows to search, access player controls, and browse channels and videos.

Leanback is launched primarily for the Google TV, the first equipment of which are expected to arrive in a few weeks. Google TV hardware owners will have the option to set their devices to use Leanback the first time they load YouTube from the regular interface.

YouTube Leanback is really just another way of watching YouTube on the big screen. Media Center programs such as XBMC, Moovida or Boxee, which are already designed for the big screens, have  plugins that offer a customized 10-foot interface for watching YouTube.

Related: Kylo, the web browser for big screens

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.
17 comments
Read more

Diagram 101: Different Types of Diagrams and When To Use Them

Diagrams are a great way to visualize information and convey meaning. The problem is that there’s too many different types of diagrams, so it can be hard to know which ones you should use in any given situation. To help you out, we’ve created this diagram that lays out the 7 most common types of diagrams and when they’re best used:
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.
1 comment
Read more