HOW TO OPTIMISE YOUR VIDEOS FOR YOUTUBE TV

YouTube is taking over TV. It is not a rumour, it is a fact! In February 2025, YouTube achieved a record-breaking milestone by capturing 11.6% of TV & Streaming viewership. The platform dominated the TV & Streaming viewership landscape in 2024 in the US, solidifying its top position.*  

But is your content optimised for the best YouTube experience on TV screens? If you are unsure how to get more views on YouTube TV, don’t worry – you are in the right place.  Now, let’s get into it.

Start by checking YouTube Studio’s advanced analytics (Select the Devices filter in the analytics) to track how many viewers watch your videos on television. To gain deeper insights, analyse your “average view duration” metric in addition to TV watch time and views. Viewers typically engage in longer viewing sessions when watching on television compared to mobile devices and computers.

A catchy, intriguing thumbnail is your ticket to TV screen viewers. Make sure to create high-resolution images (at least 1280×720) for your thumbnails and design them with a clean, balanced layout that’s easily readable at a glance. 

To maximize viewer interest, focus on creating compelling content in the first 10-30 seconds of your video. This initial hook is crucial since it plays automatically when users hover over your thumbnail in the preview feature, potentially drawing them into watching the full video – an important factor in how to get more views on YouTube.

Creating content in 4K resolution delivers the highest video quality possible. When combined with proper lighting and consistent colour grading, you can achieve a professional, polished look that enhances viewer attention.

If you can, try making episodic content and mark their episodes within the playlist settings. “Video titles should lead with the episode title and the series name as a suffix – for example ‘video title’ [series name]”

That, again, leans into more traditional TV viewing behaviour and will help users understand that each episode is part of a bigger set that they can consume in the app. It’d be ideal if your thumbnails had a consistent look while also communicating what each specific episode is about.

*Source: Nielsen

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