More and more of us are watching YouTube on our TVs, and there’s a lot to be said for putting the app up on a bigger screen and getting a more immersive audio and video experience.
If it’s something you’ve never done, it’s not difficult. There’s a free YouTube app on most smart TV platforms, and if you can’t find one, you can always connect a separate streaming device (like the Apple TV 4K box).
Once you add YouTube to your TV, there are a few tricks to make the most of it. The layout may not be immediately familiar to you, but as you play around with the app, you’ll find most of the key YouTube features are here.
These are some of our favorite tricks for watching YouTube on a TV. Note that each TV set and TV remote will vary in terms of buttons and menus, so it’s difficult to give precise instructions that work universally—but you should be able to find these features no matter which TV model you own.
1. Add videos to Watch Later
YouTube helpfully sets up a Watch Later playlist for you that you can store clips you don’t have time to watch right away, but that you do want to catch up with eventually. The playlist syncs across all your devices, including TVs.
As you’re browsing through video thumbnails on YouTube, press whatever TV remote button you would normally use to watch the selected clip, but then keep it held down—you should see a menu pop up, with a Save to Watch Later option on it.
When you watch YouTube on a TV, you get a full screen video, without the extras around it (like a description and comments). To find the comments, press the select button on your TV remote, then scroll right to the comments icon, which looks like a little speech bubble.
3. Search with your voice
Many modern TVs and streaming devices let you search with your voice, via a mic on the remote: From the home page, scroll up to the search box at the top, then select the mic icon and speak out your search. It’s a lot easier than typing words character by character.
4. Set up captions
Captions can be very helpful on YouTube, whether you’re trying to watch videos without disturbing everyone else in the house or understand a foreign language film, and the TV version of the app gives you plenty of choice when it comes to how these captions look.
While watching a video, press select, scroll right to select the gear icon, then choose Captions. You can switch between the available caption languages, and select your preferred font size, style, color, and opacity, so they’re set up exactly as you’d like.
5. See stats for nerds
If you want to see how YouTube is performing on your TV—including video resolution and network speeds—press select on a video, scroll right to select the gear icon, then enable Stats for nerds. The panel is also useful for troubleshooting problems with the app.
6. Turn off auto-play
If you don’t want a new suggested video to automatically start playing when the current one finishes, open YouTube Settings (via the gear icon, in the bottom left corner of the main interface), then choose Auto-play next video and change the setting to Off.
7. Jump to the best bits
This one is just for YouTube Premium subscribers: If you do pay your $14 a month, you have access to a feature called Jump Ahead, which highlights the most commonly viewed parts of a video. Simply put, it’s a way of getting to the best bits of a video more quickly.
Start scrolling forwards through a video (which will typically be via a right arrow button of some kind on your remote), and you should see a dot on the timeline, showing the start of the most-watched section—tap the right arrow button again to jump straight to it.
Â
More deals, reviews, and buying guides
Â