San Francisco — In a fresh move, Google owned popular video sharing network YouTube is rolling out a brand new look on its website that is designed to help make it easier for viewers to subscribe and watch channels on its site.
Apparently, part of this effort is the expansion of its Guide feature, which now reaches across multiple devices. The YouTube Guide, which helps you keep up with new videos from your subscribed channels and activity from friends, is now more prominent on the site as you browse through everything. That means there is a greater opportunity for you to click on stuff that you have already determined you liked. YouTube is also adding more opportunities for a person to subscribe to a channel with various subscription buttons.
But more importantly, the service is now rolling out a revamped site that it says is more cleaner and much simpler. Also, with channel subscriptions, YouTube has been putting great emphasis on helping users to discover new videos. Although rolled out five years ago, it was only last year when the company made it easier for people to subscribe by adding the Guide on the homepage.
As you may have noticed, when you add subscriptions to your Guide, it displays videos related to what you have seen before. Now, the Guide follows you across all of your devices, including Android, iPhone, iPad, Playstation 3, Google TV, and more — never again will you need to remember what channel had your favorite video.
Another significant modification is the way YouTube treats video playlists. As you can see from the screen-image below, the list of videos now appears on the right side of the video player, thus allowing you greater opportunity to sift though the list while the current video is still playing.
Amazingly, there are more than 4 billion hours of video watched on YouTube alone each month. Also, just within the last year, the number of users subscribing to channels has doubled, and the company is estimating that an additional 30% rise is to be expected. The hope is that viewers come for one video and can browse and find more videos afterwards, keeping them on the site longer. In other words, managing subscriptions is definitely important.
Google last redesigned YouTube a year ago with an early emphasis on channels. However, the video sharing hub said the new design will begin rolling out shortly, meaning some people may have to wait a while.