Those of you planning on buying a Google TV-powered device in the near future will now be able to make full use of YouTube Leanback, which has now been fully rolled out. And it’s actually pretty damn easy to use, even from 10-feet away.
Google TV Arrives…
The first Google TV products are on sale this weekend in the U.S., with Sony’s impressive yet expensive range of Google TV sets, and the Logitech Revue Google TV set-top box now being available to buy.
There’s no guarantee consumers are going to go for Google TV at this early stage of proceedings, but that isn’t stopping Google forging ahead with its plans to really push itself and its online video properties into the living room.
YouTube Leanback
It’s no coincidence that YouTube Leanback has been launched just ahead of the arrival of Google TV. And it’s had some work done to it in the three months since it made its beta debut in July.
YouTube Leanback is a user interface designed to make viewing YouTube videos feel much more TV-like. And though it works on the Web as a whole, it’s been designed for televisions and living room devices which connect to the Internet.
Since the above video was first aired, YouTube has made a number of improvements to Leanback.
All YouTube videos should now be viewable, but those more suited to the Leanback experience are promoted front and center. All will play in high quality and all will now come with the same pre-roll and overlay ads they would have on the regular YouTube.
Conclusions
YouTube Leanback is designed to turn YouTube into a TV channel to be viewed from 10-feet. And it handles this task with ease. While it’ll surely be improved upon as time progresses, it’s certainly ready for its Google TV debut.
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