YouTube Wants to Turbocharge Microdramas on the TV Screen

YouTube is betting that the market for microdramas on TV screens is about to boom.

The video platform on Wednesday unveiled updates to the TV experience at its annual Made on YouTube event in New York, and one of those changes is meant to bolster the burgeoning genre: Shorts Series, which will bring the episodic features of Creator Shows to YouTube Shorts on the TV glass.

It’s a move meant to turbocharge the genre, beyond the 90 percent year-over-year watch time that it sees now.

The funny thing is, YouTube was never actually all that sure that Shorts would even work on TV.

“We were bringing it to the big screen at first because we didn’t want it to feel broken,” recalls Kurt Wilms, YouTube’s director of product for the living room, when asked by The Hollywood Reporter about how the platform thinks about bringing new features to TV screens. “We were thinking what you’re saying … Who’s gonna watch it on the big screen? We launched it, and we were blown away by the response.”

“I spend a lot of time talking to creators and viewers about why they’re using the TV,” he added. “The first thing everyone was telling me about Shorts on the TV is there was no good way to watch this content with friends or family. The TV unlocked communal viewing for Shorts in a way that just wasn’t possible before, and I love watching it in my household with my significant other, with my family, and it took off.”

Microdramas are particularly ripe for disruption. Many of the current players seek to coax users to subscribe to their own standalone services, but YouTube thinks that it can leverage its scale to dominate the space, which already counts a number of creators (like Kinigra Deon) as sizable players in the genre.

Wilms says that creators that want to generate microdrama subscriptions can utilize the memberships feature, perhaps giving viewers a few episodes for free, and reserving the rest for members.

“Overall, we see a lot of success of bite-sized content that can be personalized to your taste,” says Dina Berrada, senior director of product for Shorts. “Whether it’s Shorts, microdramas is a big one, and then people seeing it as a place to spend breaks in their day from an entertainment standpoint, and doing that across a bunch of different screens.”

The company also unveiled other TV features, like bringing YouTube Posts (which feature photos and text) to the Shorts feed on TVs, and the ability to post comments via the TV using voice control.

“We talked to viewers [and they said] ‘I want to read the comments on TV,’ and we were thinking, ‘Really, you want to read the comments on the TV?’ So we enabled the ability to read the comments on TV,” Wilma says. “We don’t have a specific stat yet, but the the amount of viewers who are reading comments on the TV is approaching the same number of viewers that are reading on web.”

“We’re not trying to force anything down our viewers’ throat. It’s based on what we’re hearing, and that’s what makes us so unique,” he adds. “It’s just this feedback loop we have with both the creators and viewers, kind of in real time. We can hear what’s working, what isn’t, how they wish our platform would change, and so that’s what’s kind of driving this.”