SAN BRUNO, Calif.--YouTube is ready to take the wraps off its latest vision for how online videos can be enjoyed on larger screens.
YouTube Leanback is the newest name for an idea that has been circulating inside the company for some time, YouTube engineers and product managers said in briefings Wednesday. It's a problem the tech industry has been working on for a long time: the need to provide a unique user interface for the so-called "10-foot experience," otherwise known as watching TV while on the couch.
That means no mouse and dead-simple keystrokes are required for navigation, and YouTube thinks that a new design is a "breakthrough" in this type of user interface, said Kuan Yong, product manager for YouTube Leanback. The company is hopeful that features such as this one can help it increase the amount of time viewers spend on its site: the average user spends just 15 minutes on YouTube but 5 hours watching TV in a given day.
Watch the video below to best understand how YouTube Leanback works, but it resembles YouTube's previous attempt at solving this problem--YouTube XL--if you imagined YouTube XL flipped on its side.
Users can enter YouTube Leanback by pressing a button, at which point the video takes over the full screen. Additional related videos--set by one's YouTube preferences or videos liked by friends--can be viewed in a stream of thumbnails crawling across the bottom of the screen while the video plays, and searches for new videos can be conducted at the top of the screen. All navigation commands are based around the arrow keys and the enter key, said Julian Frumar, user interface designer for YouTube Leanback.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20009921-265.html
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