Modern Gaming Hobbyist

Wii Screen

Youtube is expanding. Google wants you to watch Youtube videos on your PC’s, Phones, PDA’s, iTouch’s, and now they want you to watch Youtube on your TV’s. Youtube’s venture onto TV’s is nothing new. They have been trying to get it to you for a while now. However, the service hasn’t really been widely adopted. Youtube on TV users have been limited to people with TiVo’s, Apple TV, and properly configured users with TVersity. Welcome to Youtube TV Beta.

Something that has always been somewhat difficult is watching Youtube on our console browsers. Contrary to traditional mouse and keyboard interfaces, consoles employ their specific controllers to allow you to browse the internet. For example, the Nintendo Wii uses its Wiimote and the Sony Playstation 3 uses its classic Playstation controller in both its varieties, Dualshock 3 and Sixaxis. What Youtube did is streamline video browsing and make it so that it looks nice on your big screen TV. You can browse videos by category or use the search function. The text is bigger and navigation is easy. There are categories on the left side of the screen and videos on the right side. Once you pick a video the usual Youtube buttons are on the bottom with the video information on the right. Play, pause, forward, backward, mute, etc. buttons are on the video screen and fade out after not being used. A full screen function is also available. There’s even an auto-play option at will play related videos to emulate an actual TV experience. It’s actually really easy to use and finally provides me a nice interface to sit back and just cruise through Youtube videos on my PS3.

In order to access this new service enter www.youtube.com/tv into your favorite console’s web browser. Sony’s PS3 browser has already added a link to it on its homepage. This URL won’t work on PC’s unless you change your User Agent.

PS3 Screen