During its keynote for Google TV today, Google announced a couch-centered interface for YouTube dubbed Lean Back. It was described as a way to gain access to YouTube’s entire video library on your television in a format “that you can just lean back and enjoy.”
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":184768,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,media,","session":"A"}']This is something YouTube has needed for some time, particularly since it just recently expanded its offering of rental content. Lean Back will let users easily browse YouTube’s library, received favorited videos from friends, and subscribe to pre-set and custom channels. Basically, it’s a highly optimized version of YouTube for your couch, and will serve as a great complement to Google TV.
Lean Back is vastly more polished than YouTube’s previous experiment in a large format version of the site, YouTube XL, and it also seems well-suited to navigation by remote control. Logitech is also developing a controller that integrates remote and keyboard functionality, so it won’t be difficult to search for YouTube content either.
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A beta of Lean Back will launch in a few weeks on YouTube’s website.
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