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When Coachella returns to YouTube next week, the music festival will be offering more than just live performances. Viewers will also be able to tune into something YouTube calls Stations — 24/7 linear streams preprogrammed with videos from artists performing at the festival, perfect for playing in the background or vegging out on the couch.
Stations are essentially YouTube’s take on FAST channels: free linear streaming TV channels that have gained popularity on services like Pluto and The Roku Channel, and are now baked into the EPGs of most smart TV operating systems.
One of the reasons FAST channels have become so popular is that they bring back passive leanback viewing, doing away with the need to find something to watch when you just want to hit play. As YouTube viewing has grown in the living room, the service has seen its viewers interested in the same thing.
“I want to put something on,” says YouTube’s senior product management director, Kurt Wilms. “I want it to be hands-free. I want it to stay in the same lane.”
YouTube quietly started testing these stations with around 40 bands and musicians in recent weeks, and plans to make the feature available widely in the future. One of the early adopters is Bruno Mars, who is currently promoting his new album with a YouTube Station.
To a viewer, such a station looks a lot like a live broadcast, complete with an audience chat. Some YouTubers have actually used YouTube’s livestreaming feature to set up similar linear feeds. However, rolling something like this on your own isn’t exactly easy, as it involves broadcasting software running on a PC 24/7 to create livestreams from prerecorded assets playing in an endless loop. If the PC ever goes down, the stream stops.
Stations are a lot easier to set up. “A creator can come onto YouTube, go into our studio product, set up a playlist of videos,” explains Wilms. “They click ‘Start Station,’ and we’ll do all the work to start the livestream for them.”
YouTube isn’t ready to share a timeline for when Stations will be made available to all creators. Wilms is already thinking about taking the feature further and opening it up to regular viewers. “We’re going to democratize it,” he says. “Anyone will be able to go in, make a playlist, and click ‘Start a Station.’ That’s what we want to get to, ultimately.”
Stations is just one of the features YouTube is looking to roll out to make its living room experience even more sticky. Earlier this week, the service launched its conversational AI tools, which debuted on web and mobile last year, within its TV app. With that, viewers are now able to ask a wide range of questions about a video with their TV’s voice remote.
Vievers can, for example, ask for substitutions while watching a cooking video, search for the moment a goal was shot during a soccer game, or even get more information about the biographical background of a creator. Answers are being presented next to the actual video and often include deep links to specific moments in the video. At times, YouTube also surfaces links to third-party websites for further reading, which viewers can access with a QR code.
“The sky is the limit on how you can use it,” Wilms says, stressing that the Gemini-powered feature doesn’t require users to rely on specific predefined queries.
YouTube is bringing its conversational AI to all TV platforms, which in itself is a testament to the power the streaming service has in the living room these days. Smart TV platforms generally like to be in control of their own voice search and assistant functionality.
However, with YouTube now responsible for 12.5 percent of all TV viewing, the service has been able to convince these platforms to hand over control of the microphone when viewers start a voice search while in the YouTube app — a rare exception that is often unavailable to other streaming services. This now allows YouTube to roll out its new conversational AI everywhere. “We’ve worked hard over the years with [our] partners to do voice routing for search,” Wilms says.
Besides Stations and conversational AI, YouTube is also working on a new second-screen feature dubbed TV Companion. With it, viewers will be able to open the YouTube app on their phone and instantly see additional information about the YouTube video playing on their TV. This will, for instance, allow viewers to easily comment on a video, look for additional clips from the same creator, or control playback.
YouTube’s TV Companion works without any kind of manual pairing, and even when the phone is not on the same Wi-Fi network, as long as both apps are logged into the same account. “This is all identity-based through the cloud,” Wilms says. “You don’t need to do any kind of dance with networking.”
YouTube will continue to support traditional casting, but banks on the TV Companion feature to increase engagement in the living room. There’s no official launch date for this feature yet, but viewers won’t have to wait too long to try it out. “It’s going to start rolling out soonish,” Wilms says.
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