Description

In anticipation of the launch of Google TV this fall, YouTube introduced its new living room play "YouTube Lean Back" yesterday. The service is available in beta online and will be built into Google TV. I landed an exclusive video interview with YouTube's interface designer Julian Frumar yesterday and he discussed the company's plans to expand Lean Back beyond Google TV and into devices from consumer electronics manufacturers.

Transcript

Julian Frumar on YouTube’s Lean Back Product Daisy Whitney: Hey there! I'm Daisy Whitney reporting for Beet.TV at YouTube’s Corporate Headquarters in San Bruno, California. Another YouTube product announcement is YouTube Leanback. It is a user interface. It is designed to make viewing YouTube videos on the television much easier and much more intuitive. It gets the sense of what users are interested in and delivers those videos to them much more it can to television. I had the chance to talk to the user interface designer and here’s what he has to say about it. So Julian, is Leanback design to primarily be a Google TV play? Julian Frumar: So, Daisy no, it’s not just a Google TV play because it will run anywhere a web browser is available. Obviously, this is really close fit with the big screen TV, living room type environment in which Google TV will provide a great platform for it to run on. However, it will also be relevant on the desktop as well where it make sense just to have a media player that will allow you without too much reading or looking around and clicking links, having to make too many decisions. You can really quickly flick through content, have content that’s relevant to your surface and always playing without you having to keep making decisions to further the experience. Daisy Whitney: Are you talking to other service providers and device makers so that it will have a further reach than the desktop and Google TV? Julian Frumar: Well, what happens today is there’s a lot of this sort of buddy boxes that plug into TV and becoming really commoditized and inexpensive. And they’re aiming at bringing internet content to the TV in a really cheap manner. When you look at some of these today, there’s a YouTube offering on it. However, these guys primarily are hardware experts and so sometimes the software looks like it’s a bit of an afterthought. So I mean, as the interface designer, I'm a lot more sensitive to this sort of stuff. And I think it’s really valuable that we have some sort of like a reference offering that people that are interested in providing a TV like experience for YouTube can look at and hopefully we do a really good job at it because we’ve tested and iterated on that. And then we can sort of meet them halfway and help provide a clean a highly usable UI. I'm sure they’d be interested in being able to like not have to put all that effort into writing their own application from scratch. So, I mean, this is my point of view as the designer, I think about interactively. Daisy Whitney: But how’s the potential to be on a Roku or a Sony Connected TV for instance? Julian Frumar: Well I think definitely there’s a place for a good highly usable YouTube application that surfaces the right content to you. So, once you’re signed in, we’re going to do the best job we can to provide that relevant content to you so that once you hit the start button a way you go, it’s just video playing and it’s really relevant to you. So, it’s essentially like your own channel instead of having to run around and find the content to consume it. It just arrives at your doorstep and I think there’s a lot of value in that services. Daisy Whitney: And that’s one of the points of this application is that you don’t have to sit around every two and a half minutes and say, “I want to watch this.” Or “I want to watch that.” Because otherwise then people would just watch TV. It knows what you want. Julian Frumar: Yeah. And I think that’s one of the big pieces of it. And also, it’s a lot more liberating for content produces everywhere, so people who have something to offer can then use a service like YouTube to release it. And then if it engages with an audience then they can opt into it and they’ll be able to watch it whereas, if you go back a few years, there were such high barriers to entry for people. They actually get content. It should be in front of people now. It allows everyone to sort of contribute to that ecosystem of different styles of content. And I think it’s a good thing for content producers to be able to surface their content to the audience without them having to put in all the legwork trying to find it themselves. Daisy Whitney: So final question for you. How would you get the word out in like consumers who didn’t know this exist? Julian Frumar: Well hopefully you're helping, so thanks for that. That we’re going to initially start in the area, the site we call TestTube which is where we release fledgling products and new experience to features. It’s like a testing ground. So, if people go to YouTube.com/testtube, they’ll find this amongst others, but also we’re exposing it at YouTube.com/leanback and it’s in its infancy now because we’re just launching it but eventually it will become more tightly integrated into the site. So, we’re seeing it as like a new view mode which you’ll be able to launch from a variety of places such as like the traditional video playback page. It seems like a good location to have a launch by then and also, whenever you have a playlist or a set of video, well I think they’re also good candidate places to have this launch button that will start this playback experience. And then it will just continue carrying on without you having to like you said make decisions every two or four minutes. Daisy Whitney: All right, thank you Julian. Julian Frumar: Thank you.