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In a recent Youtube Help post, a Team Youtube community manager detailed its efforts to make signing into the service on your television more seamless. Normally, you’d have to pull up the login screen and utilize the frustratingly slow keyboard with your Chromecast with Google TV or Android TV OS remote.
The issue with this is that you need to click the arrows to move between every character, and if you have a particularly long password like me, this is a pain in the neck. Of course, connecting your Google TV app to your TV allows you to swype login details using your phone’s screen, but still, the original method is excruciating. Luckily, that is no longer the case!
Launching the Youtube app on your TV will now prompt you to open the Youtube app on your phone, and so long as you’re on the same Wi-Fi network with both devices, the account you’re signed into on your mobile will be detected and you’ll be signed in on the big screen.
In addition to this fantastic, time-saving update, casting to the app is now easier as well. Upon casting, you’ll now be able to use the full Youtube experience instead of being locked into a limited video without all of the app’s features.
Lastly, there have been some captioning improvements, an updated browser engine allows Youtube to use background music playback with network loss recovery, and the quality selector icon on the Youtube watch page will display the current quality as opposed to a simple cogwheel with no extra information. This should save you a few clicks while attempting to check that the video you’re watching is at the quality you expect for your network speed.
Overall, these improvements are welcome, but most of them aren’t very eye-catching on the surface. Any means of improving the experience for viewing content in the living room is a big priority for Google right now, as it’s previously stated many times. Let me know in the comments if there is a specific Youtube feature for the TV version of the app that you hope is implemented this year.
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