New Youtube Interface

Youtube now uses a more simple design just like the other google sites.

The new polished design features a grainy grey background with red and black color schemes.

With this new design, Google is hoping this will make it easier for people to find stuff they like while also luring them into spending more time on the site. But the ultimate goal is much more ambitious than just making the video-sharing site look less cluttered: Google wants YouTube to be so wonderful that people will use it the way they use TV—surfing channels when they’re bored and want to be entertained rather than when they’re looking for something specific.

“To be totally candid, what we’re doing is bringing YouTube up to 2011,” said Noam Lovinsky, group product manager at YouTube. “The old look and feel is one we’ve had since the launching of the site, and over the past six years the site has built up some crust, to say the least.”

Now, with the redesign, “we’re looking across every page, and every template, and we’re trying to standardize, streamline, and simplify,” Lovinsky says.

“The message of that investment was that if you’re a professional content producer, YouTube is now a legitimate first place to bring your programming,” says Fred Seibert, head of Frederator Studios, a longtime creator of animated TV shows that has signed on to make a channel for YouTube.

Also in the mix is Google TV, software that connects the Internet to your living-room TV. So far Google TV has not caught on, but that could change if Google can improve the software and convince more TV makers to build Google TV into their sets.

The broad outlines of Google’s ambitions are becoming clearer: give YouTube a fresh, friendly interface that makes it look more like TV; pay Hollywood producers to create professional content; and use Google TV to bring that content into the living room.

But back to the redesign. Highlights include:

• A new homepage that has been restyled to show which channels you’ve subscribed to and let you quickly flick through them each time you come to the site. There’s also a darker background, which “really makes the videos pop—it makes the video the star of the page,” Lovinsky says.

• A channel “store” that helps you shop around for channels you might like to subscribe to, using Google’s search algorithms to bring up channels relevant to you based on the other stuff you’re already watching.

• New player controls that let you adjust the size and quality of the player.

• New templates for content producers that aim to create a more uniform look across all of YouTube, “so it can’t be all `MySpacey,’” Lovinsky jokes.

credits: thedailybeast.com