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YouTube is letting you vote on feature requests for its TV and gaming console apps

As of late, YouTube on smart/connected TVs has been a big focus area, and the company is letting the community vote on what feature requests the development team should prioritize. 

Our teams prioritize feature requests based on feedback we receive either through the official feedback tool or here, directly from the community!

To be more transparent about what our top feature requests are and to provide a forum for you to more directly contribute your ideas, I want to collect all community feature and feedback requests for the YouTube app on TVs and gaming consoles in this post.

YouTube will identify frequent TV app feature requests and let people thumbs up or down them — yes, you can see a dislike count. There are currently five: 

  • Ability to block channels
  • Expanding HD & 4K to more devices
  • Ability to livestream
  • Ability to control playback speed
  • Expanding comment functionality (viewing comments across more devices and posting them)

You can make requests and vote in this thread. Features requests look like they’ll be added quarterly:

If you see a feature request that you like and want us to prioritize, you can upvote it so we know how popular it is

I’ll take these requests to Product on your behalf, based on ones that have the most upvotes – so please upvote instead of posting a duplicate 

On televisions, YouTube recently expanded 5.1 surround sound support to “all 2021 and later TVs, Chromecast, Apple TV, Roku and most Fire TV devices” for “any 5.1-enabled video.” Google notes that “many 2020 and earlier TVs may also support surround sound.”

Prior to this change, you could only watch paid movies and shows with 5.1 surround sound – so we’re happy to be expanding 5.1 audio support to more of the content that you watch

There’s the ability for YouTube on Android and iOS to connect to your television for easy commenting and sharing. You can now also search while watching a video in the background thanks to an overlay UI.

More on YouTube:

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Avatar for Abner Li Abner Li

Editor-in-chief. Interested in the minutiae of Google and Alphabet. Tips/talk: abner@9to5g.com