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YouTube Launches Leanback, New HTML5 Mobile Site Gets Better Quality

by Amar Toor on July 8, 2010 at 10:45 AM

YouTUbe Leanback

Big changes are afoot at YouTube, on both desktop and mobile fronts. The video sharing site finally launched its new TV-friendly 'Leanback' Web interface yesterday, just a month after parent Google announced its own highly touted GoogleTV platform. Leanback [Ed. Note: Does this make anyone else wanna 'Do the Rock Away?'] lets users navigate feeds, recommendations, searches and categories, by using a simple five-key setup (four arrow keys plus the return key). A video takes up the entire browser, as illustrated in the demo video below. Engadget's already played around with the new interface, and says that the streamlined navigation controls make for quicker browsing, even if YouTube's recommendations are still embarrassingly accurate.


YouTube has also unveiled a revamped version of its mobile application in the hopes of engendering greater parity between its smartphone and desktop platforms. As the site explains on its blog, the new YouTube Mobile features a larger, more touch-friendly user interface, and will allow users to create playlists, browse through suggestions, and 'like' or 'unlike' videos directly from their phones. Of course, it's "really fast." In our tests, we found the videos to be of a significantly higher quality than those offered by the old YouTube app.


As Tech Crunch explains, YouTube's latest mobile move may underscore some latent tensions with Apple. As it turns out, YouTube doesn't really control its own iPhone app. The company may collaborate with Apple, but, as product manager Andrey Doronichev implies in the video above, Apple hasn't really been able to keep up with YouTube's constantly evolving demands. Whereas the previous iPhone app used a video-streaming format tailor-made for Edge (and not 3G), the new YouTube Mobile platform incorporates HTML5, which allows for significantly clearer, higher-quality video -- or, in the video's words, "the full YouTube experience." For more information on the new app, and to stay up to date with the latest updates, check out m.youtube.com. [From: YouTube, via: Engadget and TechCrunch]

Tags: Apple, appstore, google, GoogleTv, html5, iphone, Iphone3g, Iphone3gs, Iphone4, iphoneapp, leanback, m.youtube.com, mobile, top, tv, video, WebApps, youtube, YoutubeLeanback

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