Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
YouTube just released some new stats that show how the service is being consumed on televisions, and the numbers are enormous. Watch time on TV for sports content was up 30 percent year over year; viewers watched more than 400 million hours of podcasts on their TVs every month.
This is YouTube we’re talking about, though, so of course the numbers are huge. The living room has been YouTube’s fastest-growing platform for years — Alphabet’s chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, said on the company’s most recent earnings call that watch time is growing across YouTube “with particular strength in Shorts and in the living room.” Even as YouTube continues to dominate basically all facets of the entertainment business, the arrow on your TV still points up.
The trend hasn’t changed in forever, but YouTube has spent the last couple of years finally doing something about it. It launched a way to sync your phone and your TV, so you can watch a video on the big screen and interact with it on the small one. Earlier this year, the company redesigned the TV interface to make it easier to find comments, links, and channel pages while you’re watching a video. It redesigned those channel…
